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Ranking of query is one of the fundamental problems in information retrieval (IR), [1] the scientific/engineering discipline behind search engines. [2] Given a query q and a collection D of documents that match the query, the problem is to rank, that is, sort, the documents in D according to some criterion so that the "best" results appear early in the result list displayed to the user.
The rank value indicates an importance of a particular page. A hyperlink to a page counts as a vote of support. The PageRank of a page is defined recursively and depends on the number and PageRank metric of all pages that link to it ("incoming links"). A page that is linked to by many pages with high PageRank receives a high rank itself.
User queries are matched against the database information. However, as opposed to classical SQL queries of a database, in information retrieval the results returned may or may not match the query, so results are typically ranked. This ranking of results is a key difference of information retrieval searching compared to database searching. [2]
Evaluation measures for an information retrieval (IR) system assess how well an index, search engine, or database returns results from a collection of resources that satisfy a user's query. They are therefore fundamental to the success of information systems and digital platforms.
A search engine results page (SERP) is a webpage that is displayed by a search engine in response to a query by a user. The main component of a SERP is the listing of results that are returned by the search engine in response to a keyword query. The results are of two general types: organic search: retrieved by the search engine's algorithm;
It considers the relevance of each document only in terms of how much new information it brings given the previous results. [13] In some cases, a query may have an ambiguous interpretation, or a variety of potential responses. Providing a diversity of results can be a consideration when evaluating the utility of a result set. [14]
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This makes it easier to achieve a higher rank in search engines which usually results in higher web traffic and, ideally, conversions. The downside of this practice is that the website is optimized for alternative keywords instead of the main keyword; main keywords might be very difficult to rank due to high competition. [2]