Techniques to perform relative ranking for search results

An article comprising a storage medium containing instructions that if executed enable a system to:

• search for resources in response to a search query with multiple search terms;
• retrieve search term position information for each resource;
• generate with a computing device a proximity feature value based on the search term position information using an ordered cost function, wherein the ordered cost function requires search terms to be in the same order as in the search query and wherein the ordered cost function is based in part on the number of different terms in a chunk of the resource and inversely proportional to a product of a length of the chunk and a number of search terms in the search query;
• and
• rank the resources based on the proximity feature value.

An apparatus, comprising:

• at least one processor for executing computer readable instructions;
• at least one computer readable medium storing the computer readable instructions that when executed by the at least one processor provide:
• an enhanced search component operative to receive a search query and provide a ranked search results responsive to the search query, the enhanced search component comprising:
• a resource search module operative to search for resources using multiple search terms from the search query, and output a set of resources having some or all of the search terms;
• a proximity generation module communicatively coupled to the resource search module, the proximity generation module operative to receive the set of resources, retrieve search term position information for each resource, and generate a proximity feature value based on the search term position information using an ordered cost function, wherein the ordered cost function is:
• F
• ⁡
• (
• chunk
• properties
• )
• =
• NumberofDifferentTermsInChunk
• chunk
• length
• *
• NumberofTermsInQuery
• +
• NumberofDifferentTermsInChunk
• -
• 1
• NumberofTermsInQuery
• wherein chunkproperties represents a chunk of one of the resources, NumberofDifferentTermsInChunk is the number of different terms in the chunk, chunklength is the length of the chunk, and NumberofTermsinQuery is the number of terms in a search query including the one or more search terms;
• and
• a resource ranking module communicatively coupled to the resource search module and the proximity generation module, the resource ranking module to receive the proximity feature values, and rank the resources based in part on the proximity feature values.