Lullabot has provided a very detailed article about the search module in Drupal 5 along with a patch that could be found useful.  As articles continue to increase here at CMS Report I've been thinking about the need to tweak some of the factors for weighting search results.  Lullabot's  timing for putting out this post is just perfect.

In this article I will show how the results of the search module can be fine tuned using controls available to Drupal site administrators. The search module's configuration options include up to four extra parameters called scoring factors for weighting search results based on keyword relevance, recency, number of comments, and the number of page views. It will be shown that adjusting these values can dramatically alter and improve the order of search results. We will then add a theme function to enhance the themed search items by displaying their score. Finally, we will extend the advanced search form to include the scoring factor controls so that every search can be custom tailored with regards to the scoring algorithm.

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