Very interesting

Thanks! It’s a start, hopefully it will prove useful and can develop into something more intelligent. But initially, the choices are based on click-through rates, the kind that is used to summarise ad and email marketing success: Rate (%) = Clicks (#) / Views (#)

These are calculated on a per-search basis, so if a post has been displayed 5 times for a specific search and clicked 5 times it has a 100% click-through rate and is judged to have been useful. Any click-through rate greater than 0 will cause those posts to float to the top five search results. The only thing that can beat the click-through rate is if one specific post has been ‘pinned’ by an administrator, giving them a way to artificially float new posts, for example. There’s a little more going on, but that’s the primary method.

All of the plugin data is stored in separate tables, starting with ‘sro_’ and they’re used maintain search terms and links to post ids. I’m trying to keep the data storage requirements as low as possible, so it’s normalizing and aggregating data.