Short queries consist of four or fewer non-stopwords. If any documents contain all of the query words, they will be presented in the top tier of results. Documents which partially match will be presented in subsequent tiers. Within a tier, documents are ranked by their relevance score, which takes into account the relative rarity of the query terms, the frequency with which they occur in the document and the length of the document. In addition, the scores of documents containing the query words in their title or in the URL of the page are boosted.
Long queries consist of five or more non-stopwords.
Top-tier answers need not necessarily contain occurrences of all query words. Instead, documents are ranked by their relevance score. In this example, the related sites are generated by a customisable thesaurus. The top tier of results contains more than 3000 documents which include both query words. They are ranked by relevance score.