[thelist] Weighting Search results

[Steve Cook]

Hi folks,

I think I've asked about this sort of application before, but now I've got a
specific application and wanted to get some advice on "standard" solutions
if there are any!

I need to get the results of a search from a database (SQL Server using ASP)
and sort those results according to the user's preferences. This should be a
similar task to "weighting" in a search engine application. 

In this case the search results are various events, which can be in
different categories. For instance "Theatre", "Concert" etc. Each category
will be assigned an ID number which will correspond to a look-up table for
the description. Each user of the site has the possibility to mark their
personal preferences, eg. that they are interested in concerts and sports.
When they visit the homepage of the site, the listing of latest events
should be sorted by a balance between the user's preference (so that
concerts and sports events appear first), the date the event was added to
the list and the "importance" of the event which will be a value we place
upon it when we add the event to the list.

I know that I can order my SQL to do the date and "importance" sorting, but
I guess I'm gonna need to get back a result set and then weight the results
in the code to reflect ordering based upon user preferences. Anyone know of
an algorithm to do this or an article that explains the concepts behind
result weighting?

Cheers

.steve

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