On 11 October 2011 16:53, WereSpielChequers werespielchequers@gmail.com wrote:
I don't know how Google does it, but I'd bet that our search prioritises by word order in the description. So a description that starts Pearl Necklace comes before "A white pearl necklace". If you amend the description them I suspect the search results will change.
There's some notes on the internals of Lucene-search here:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Rainman/search_internals
"Article content" presumably is the same as the image description in our context. I don't know quite what the "rank" metric would mean in the Commons context - presumably, only links from local pages on Commons count?
It may be that more controversial images provoke more meta-discussion, with more links to them as a result (from talkpages, deletion discussions, etc) and so are more likely to appear "popular" to the search system, but that's just a guess.