Ranking Basics

This is for:

Developer System Administrator

In this article

Pro and Enterprise editions only

Establishing the ranking of a Coveo item is done in four phases:

Phase 1: Determines the Coveo items to which the user has access. The user email address is used by the Coveo security providers - specifically the Email Security Provider as a single sign-on (SSO) - to match security entries within the security cache.
Phase 2 and 3: Match expressions to content and field values.
Phase 4: Evaluates frequency, proximity, and term value.

In the end, a total of a thousand (1,000) Coveo Items are confirmed and form the result list.

Ranking strategies that may be applied to alter the ranking score of a result are:

Ranking strategy	Phase applicability	Recommended usage	Recommended approach
Ranking expression	Query	Best practice	For a Cloud index using the Coveo Administration Console (see Manage ranking expressions) or using $qre query expression.
Ranking override	Index	Not preferred	For a Cloud index using the Coveo Administration Console (see Manage ranking weights) or using $weight query expression.

You can see the ranking score of a search result by selecting Alt (Windows) or Option (Mac) and double-clicking any given result list, which opens the debug panel (see Use the JavaScript Search Debug Panel).