Patent ID: 7546294

Claim:
A method for performing a document search, comprising: providing a plurality of documents, each document being associated with at least one search query; identifying one or more feature parameters for use in a document ranker, each feature parameter having an initial parameter value; ranking each of the plurality of documents relative to a test set of documents at each of a plurality of parameter variations using said document ranker, wherein each parameter variation comprises a parameter value for an associated feature parameter and the initial parameter value for all other feature parameters; determining, for each of the plurality of documents, one or more parameter variations that produce a ranking change for a document relative to one or more of the test documents, wherein the determining one or more parameter variations is performed by at least one of one or more computing devices; aggregating, for each feature parameter, the ranking changes for each of the plurality of documents for each parameter variation associated with the feature parameter, wherein the aggregating the ranking changes is performed by at least one of the one or more computing devices; identifying, for each feature parameter, a parameter variation corresponding to a maximum relevance value based on the aggregated ranking changes for each of the plurality of documents, wherein the identifying a parameter variation is performed by at least one of the one or more computing devices; adjusting the parameter values of the plurality of parameters based on the identified parameter variations corresponding to the maximum relevance values, wherein adjusting the parameter values comprises: (1) calculating a parameter gain based on the identified parameter variation for each parameter value; (2) determining a gain factor for each parameter value corresponding to the calculated parameter gain divided by the largest identified parameter gain; and (3) modifying each parameter value by an amount proportional to the gain factor for the parameter value, and wherein the adjusting the parameter values is performed by at least one of the one or more computing devices; receiving a search query; and calculating a ranking value for at least one document using the adjusted parameter value in response to the search query.