> Of course this might be just the right ordering for someone, but in > general an ordering that takes into account where the search terms > occurred in the records, in addition to how popular the works are, > should work better than one that ignores that information. > > --Th Field weighting is a fairly common search functionality. Additionally, some search engines (I would bet Google does this) provide proximity importance. One SE I know of builds a second index just for this purpose (though I imagine Google does it by brute force on the query end of things). It's still hard to say how well X works for Y based on observations by one or two people, but I'd say that Fielding's work peppered in that mix does seem off. It's also hard to tell what can be fixed by search and what needs other mechanisms to resolve it. Karen G. Schneider [log in to unmask]