Websearch.co.il: Your search, your ranking
The distinctive idea behind websearch.co.il is that users can adjust how search results are ranked. This vector rendering of the original screenshot shows the controls for choosing which page fields matter most. Privacy and anonymous search are important goals too, but ranking control is the central feature.
What do the boosts mean?
When a search engine evaluates a query, matches in a domain, title, heading, or body can contribute differently to relevance. Higher values express stronger relative emphasis within the configured ranking formula.
Domain and title
The screenshot assigns a boost of 7 to the domain and 5 to the page title. These fields can help when someone searches for a particular site or topic.
Headings and description
H1 and H2 are weighted at 3.5, while the description is weighted at 3. These signals can help identify the subject of a page.
Links and keywords
Anchor text is weighted at 2.5 and keywords at 3.5. Metadata alone should not determine relevance; real query testing matters.
Page content
Body content has a weight of 1. This is a relative weight, not a statement that content is unimportant: body text can still be fundamental to matching a query.
How should ranking be tuned?
Evaluate real search queries, measure relevance, avoid excessive domain bias, and adjust weights incrementally. Actual results also depend on tokenization, indexing, score normalization, and the query parser.
These are settings of this search engine, not a description of Google’s ranking algorithm or any other external search provider.
Further reading
Learn more about search queries and relevance in the Apache Solr Query Guide and Apache Lucene.
Happy searching with Websearch.co.il!
