Understanding Search Results Ranking

Ranking is the process during which search results are sorted by relevance to your query from the most to the least pertinent. The Coveo Platform ranks search results by calculating a relevance score (in percentage) based on a series of ranking factors parameters. The Coveo Platform uses this relevance score to sort search results when you select to sort results by relevance (see Changing How Results Are Sorted).

The following table lists the ranking factors.

Ranking factor category	Ranking factor
Content	Term frequency Term proximity Term in title Term in concepts Term in summary (see What Is a Summary?) Term correlation within stemming classes (see About Stemming)
Document	Documents modified recently Document quality evaluation Document in user language
Location	Source rating Terms in address
Formatting	Term has formatting Term casing (see Are Queries Case-Sensitive?)
Collaborative rating	Collaborative rating weight (see What Is Collaborative Rating?)
Custom	Custom ranking weight

You can contribute to the ranking of a document for a given query by rating the document in a .NET search interface (see Rating a Search Result).

Because of their nature, .NET search interface Top Results (see About Top Results in .NET Search Interfaces) and mini-results (see About Mini-Results in .NET Search Interfaces) are not affected by ranking and always appear at the top of the first search result page.

Note: Your Coveo administrator can modify the relative weight of each factor in order to fine-tune ranking (see Customizing Search Results Ranking).