Tuning Rank Factors

This topic describes how to use the Rank Factors page to adjust the influence that each rank factor has on the ActivityRanks of items and people. This page also lets you enable, disable, and specify the expiration time of item and person click views.

Click Save to keep any changes that you have made. If you have made changes but have not yet clicked Save, you can click Cancel to restore the previously-saved settings.

This topic discusses:

Rank Factors
Click Expiration
Recommended Process for Tuning Rank Factors

Rank Factors

Use the Rank Factors area to adjust the global influence that each rank factor has on the ActivityRank of items and people. For each rank factor, adjust the slider or type a value from 0%–100%. See Special Tuning Considerations for important information on how ActivityRank is calculated and the relative relationship that rank factors have to each other.

The following table lists each rank factor in the Items section of the Rank Factors page. For each rank factor, the table lists:

the source object whose ActivityRank influences the ActivityRank of the target object
the action that the source object performs on the target object to influence its ActivityRank
the target object

Rank Factor	Source Object	Action	Target Object
The rank of the author Note: For this rank factor, Pathways considers authored items to be Collaboration discussion messages.	person	authors	item
The rank of the submitter (if author is unknown) Note: For this rank factor, Pathways considers submitted items to be documents uploaded to Collaboration or manually submitted to the Knowledge Directory.	person	submits	item
The rank and number of people who edit Note: For this rank factor, Pathways considers edited items to be documents edited in Collaboration.	person	edits	item
The rank and number of people who add as a favorite	person	adds to My Favorites list	item
The rank and number of people who tag	person	applies tag	item
The rank and number of people who view	person	views	item

The following table lists each rank factor in the People section of the Rank Factors page. For each rank factor, the table lists:

the source object whose ActivityRank influences the ActivityRank of the target object
the action that the target object performs on the source object
the target object

Note: For these rank factors, the ActivityRanks of the source objects influence the ActivityRanks of the target objects, even though the target objects actually perform the actions on the source objects. For example, when a person authors an item, the item's ActivityRank influences the author's ActivityRank.

Rank Factor	Source Object	Action	Target Object
The rank and number of items authored Note: For this rank factor, Pathways considers items to be Collaboration discussion messages.	item	is authored by	person
The rank and number of items submitted Note: For this rank factor, Pathways considers items to be documents uploaded to Collaboration or manually submitted to the Knowledge Directory.	item	is submitted by	person
The rank and number of items edited Note: For this rank factor, Pathways considers items to be documents edited in Collaboration.	item	is edited by	person
The rank and number of people who have this person as contact	person	is added to Contacts list by	person
The rank and number of people who tag	person	is tagged by	person
The rank and number of people who view	person	is viewed by	person

Click Expiration

Use the Click Expiration area to enable and disable the expiration of item click views and specify the period of time after which item click views expire.

Note: Regardless of your click expiration settings, the Rank Engine calculates an item or person's ActivityRank by using only the most recent click of each person who has viewed that item or person. This restriction alleviates the chance of an item or person rising to the top of a result set due to multiple clicks by a single person.

Select True or False to enable or disable the expiration of item click views.

Select a value from the Number of Weeks menu. When click expiration is enabled, the Rank Engine does not use item click views that are older than the specified number of weeks to calculate ActivityRank.

Recommended Process for Tuning Rank Factors

We recommend that you use the following iterative process to tune rank factors. Repeat this process until you are satisfied with the ActivityRanks of your search results:

Type a search query and perform a search.
Use the same search query each time you repeat this process.
Notice the order of your search results and their individual ActivityRanks.
(For information on how to enable the display of ActivityRanks, see Setting Pathways Preferences.)
Tune rank factors as desired.
Run an incremental update of the Rank Engine on the Schedule And Status page.

Note: To save time, allow only the first incremental update to complete all stages. With each subsequent incremental update, use the option Start over and skip the data gathering phase.

Tuning Rank Factors

Source Object

Source Object