Weighted search
<information science> A search based on frequencies of the search terms in the documents being searched.
Weighted search is often used by search engines.
It produces a numerical score for each possible document.
A document's score depends on the frequency of each search term in that document compared with the overall frequency of that term in the entire corpus of documents.
A common approach is called tf.idf which stands for term frequency * inverse document frequency.
Term frequency means "the more often a term occurs in a document, the more important it is in describing that document." http://ciir.cs.umass.edu/cmpsci646/ir4/tsld034.htm Inverse document frequency means the more documents a term appears in, the less important the term is.
A simple weighted search is just a list of search terms, for example: car automobile
Weighted search is often contrasted with boolean search. It is possible to have a search that syntactically is a boolean search but which also does a weighted search.
See also query expansion.
For a detailed technical discussion see Chapter 5, "Search Strategies", in the reference below.
["Information Retrieval", C. J. van Rijsbergen, (http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/Keith/Chapter.5/Ch.5.html)].
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