When you sort search results by "Relevance", Elium gives each article a score and shows the highest scores first. This page explains how this score is calculated, so you can write articles that are easy to find.

How an article gets its score

Elium looks for your words in several fields of each article: the title, the tags, the body, the comments and the attached files. Each field where a word appears adds points to the score. An article that matches in several fields can therefore rank above an article that matches only in its title.

The points of a field depend on three things:

The weight of the field. A word in the title counts more than a word in a comment.
How rare the word is. A word that appears in few articles counts more than a word that appears everywhere.
How often the word appears in this field of the article.

A title that contains your words in the same order, even with the last word incomplete, also gets extra points.

Weight of each field

Field	Weight	Weight of exact words
Title	1.6	2.0
Title in your content language	1.7	2.1
Tags	1.4	1.7
Tags in your content language	1.5	1.8
Body, and body in your content language	1.0	1.1
Attached files	1.0	1.1
Template fields	1.0	1.1
Comments	0.8	0.9

"Exact words" are the words as you typed them. Without quotes, Elium also finds variations of a word, such as "refunds" for "refund", but exact matches count a little more. With quotes, Elium only looks for the exact words.

Recent articles first

Elium favours articles that were updated recently. An article keeps its full score for 30 days after its last update. After that, its score slowly goes down: after one year, it keeps about a third of its score. An old article can still come first if it matches your words much better than the others.

Search in several languages

If your preferred content language is not the main language of the platform, Elium also searches the titles, tags and text translated into this language.

Words that are ignored

Very common words, such as "the", "and", "le", "et", "la" or "y", are removed from the search. Elium uses lists of these words for English, French and Spanish. This removes noise from the results.

This is a problem when such a word has a meaning of its own, for example "On" as the name of a product. There is no way to force the search of an ignored word, even in quotes.

Why an article does not appear

The words of the search do not appear in the article.
One word of the search is missing: by default, all the words must be present.
The words are very common, so they count for little.
The words only appear in fields with a low weight, such as comments.
A word is ignored because it is too common.
The title of the article is too general.

Write articles that are easy to find

Write clear and precise titles.
Add tags that describe the topic.
Put the important information in the body of the article, rather than in the comments.
Translate the titles and the tags when your platform has several languages.
Update your articles: recent articles rank higher.

Search algorithm