Search Results Explained

The UKAS free text search creates scores for the search results based on the Ultraseek package. The scoring is based on the following factors:

Frequency of the term(s) within the document – this can include individual words and exact phrases.
Location of the terms(s) within the document – depending on where the location of a term is within a document a different score will be allocated to the term.
Rarity of the individual term(s), including phrases - a term found in every document ends up having very little effect on the score. Phrases and proper names typically contribute much more to the end score.
Occurrence of multiple query terms - An algorithm is tuned to rank documents which contain several or all of the search terms higher than those which only contain one, even if the one is repeated frequently.
Document quality based on numerous factors - the goal of these quality factors is to rank the best results higher for queries which may return many similarly-ranked results, without significantly changing the basic principles used in the scoring elements above.

If you would like more information on the how the search results work please visit the Ultraseek website.