Search Ranking

Summer of Code 2008 Group Page: http://groups.drupal.org/soc-2008
Summer of Code 2008 Search Ranking Project Wiki: http://groups.drupal.org/node/10906
Module Project Page: http://drupal.org/project/search_ranking
Module Issue Queue: http://drupal.org/project/issues/search_ranking

About:
This module was created for the Drupal CMS as part of a Google Summer of Code 2008 project. This module allows Drupal 6.x users to take advantage of a new feature that will be available in Drupal 7.x (thanks to douggreen) that enables search results to be scored differently based on a number of ranking factors.

This module overrides the default search provided by node.module. Site administrators who are looking to use this on an existing website will not have to worry about users with bookmarked search pages getting 404 errors because it seemlessly overrides the search behavior provided by node.module while extending the ranking factors by providing hook_ranking().

If you have ideas for other ranking factors or other features please add a new issue to the queue so that it can be discussed, planned, and executed.

Features

Features support for the following scoring factors out of the "box":

- Relevance (keyword relevancy score)
- Sticky
- Promoted
- Recency (time posted)
- Comment (number comments)
- Statistics (number visits)
- Incoming Links (number of other nodes linking to a node increases score) [added version: 1.2]

Additional enhancements to the search experience include:

- AJAX based test search form that allows you to test ranking factor settings in real time just below the ranking settings form.
- Search score shows up below each result as a percentage.

Other modules that provide ranking factors include:

-VotingAPI (Patch in queue: http://drupal.org/node/284209#comment-971540)