Smart Ranking and Customized Results
After performing a search (using either the simple universal search or advanced search) vLex will show you a list of results. The search results are, by default, sorted by relevance.
The relevance in vLex is calculated using our exclusive algorithm, which takes the following factors in to account:
- Textual Ranking. Shows documents where the search terms have more importance (more occurrences and key fragments).
- Legal Ranking. Gives priority to results from sources of higher legal status. For example, a result from a higher court will have priority over a result from a minor court, a law will have higher priority than a decree.
- Ranking by citation frequency. The system analyzes citations from legal documents, and gives higher ranking to documents that are cited more frequently, especially those that are cited by important and recent documents.
- Social ranking. Analyzes the behavior of users by identifying signs that a document has been a good result (for example: printing, downloading, e-mailing, etc.) or that it has been a bad result (“bounce rate”: where a user immediately goes back to the search and clicks on another result). It uses repeated searches to identify which documents are preferred by users and gives those documents a more prominent place. As more and more users use the system, it learns, giving more relevant results.
- Personal ranking. Analyzes your personal preferences, using the SmartTopics and subscribed documents as indicators.
- Editorial ranking. For the most frequent searches our editorial team manually selects the key search results for that term.
Sorting Criteria
In addition to organizing the search results by relevance (default option) you also have the ability to select how you want your search results organized. The choices are:
- Sort by date (most recent or oldest)
- Sort by popularity. We organize the results based on the success of that search among all vLex users (social ranking)
- Sort by number of citations. This option is only available in Canada
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