WoW Armory question: how relevant is “Relevance”?

Ever been as curious as to how Blizzard‘s The Warcraft Armory database uses “Relevance”? You may have, since there are times when searching for a World of Warcraft character sometimes yields different search rankings when you decided to search for it again. What changed significantly wasn’t the information within the document (although over time, it does); it was the percentage followed by the field “Relevance”.

Yahoo! Search has it and so does Google Search. So you can be sure that The Warcraft Armory for World of Warcraft would have it, too. “Relevance” is commonly used as a way to rank potential matches based on your search parameters, such as the exact spelling and arrangement of words in a search phrase for instance.

Then why does an exact character search phrase yield a search list ranking the intended page on number eight – even if it came up as item number one earlier? Because much like Yahoo! or Google, the Armory‘s Relevance ranking changes over time. This has much to do with other factors that affect the Armory’s relevance values.

And going through the Armory’s FAQ, you can find that these factors would also affect relevance: the level of the character and the last login time of the character. So expect that two characters of the similar name – yet different realms – would result in one character ranking higher than the other, because the higher ranker logged in two hours ago while the lower ranked character logged in three days ago.

Ever been as curious as to how Blizzard‘s The Warcraft Armory database uses “Relevance”? You may have, since there are times when searching for a World of Warcraft character sometimes yields different search rankings when you decided to search for it again. What changed significantly wasn’t the information within the document (although over time, it does); it was the percentage followed by the field “Relevance”.

Yahoo! Search has it and so does Google Search. So you can be sure that The Warcraft Armory for World of Warcraft would have it, too. “Relevance” is commonly used as a way to rank potential matches based on your search parameters, such as the exact spelling and arrangement of words in a search phrase for instance.

Then why does an exact character search phrase yield a search list ranking the intended page on number eight – even if it came up as item number one earlier? Because much like Yahoo! or Google, the Armory‘s Relevance ranking changes over time. This has much to do with other factors that affect the Armory’s relevance values.

And going through the Armory’s FAQ, you can find that these factors would also affect relevance: the level of the character and the last login time of the character. So expect that two characters of the similar name – yet different realms – would result in one character ranking higher than the other, because the higher ranker logged in two hours ago while the lower ranked character logged in three days ago.