Dec
4th
2014
I am most relevant to nothing at all. · 6:11pm Dec 4th, 2014
So, apparently, if you execute a search on FiMFiction with absolutely nothing in the search box, the first result on the "relevance" criterion is my "Heart is Where the Home Is."
While I'm glad for any happenstance that drives traffic to my userpages, I cannot quite figure out how that happened. It's of course not the newest or the most popular story on the site, for any of its tags; and it can be replicated across different users, so it's highly unlikely that it's just random.
I saw that.
I think it's because your story has no character tags since you were trying to be all slick with its narraator :3, same as the aforementioned search technique.
Clearly the site wisely guides the searcher to the fandom's best writer.
2633558
I agree. What I think happened is that it's the most popular fic that has no character tags and thus it shows up first when you search for nothing at all.
The fact that a search for nothing returns any results at all is surprising in of itself.
2633564, 2633558
2633563
Flatterer.
That search results in a surprising number of good authors/stories. Honestly, it's about the most successful result string I've seen with the new search feature, which is... interesting.
'course, it might help my feelings that one of my own stories shows up on the first batch of cards. Which is a surprise in itself, because it seems like my stories don't tend to show up very quickly on searches. (Yay, pleasant surprises!)
But in any case, congratu-pony-lations on being Fimfiction's author default!
Taking a bit longer look... Actually, Skywriter old buddy, I think you've just uncovered something VERY interesting and useful. Which I totally ought to keep to myself and be all Bad Horse about, but what can I say, I'm a blabbermouth.
The new search algorithm is giving priority to near-as-possible matches. Since users are almost certainly going to search on small tag sets (probably one or two characters, one genre tag), there's now a real premium for minimal tagging as a form of search optimization. Stories with the whole tag mess, like you often see with newer writers, are going to get strongly disadvantaged.
Um... Excuse me for a moment while I... do something totally unrelated to ponyfiction. I swear.
2633595
Noticed that too. Shouldn't people be keeping their tags as clean as possible anyway though?
2633600
Generally, they should. But a lot of people, myself included, tend to be a little loose with them to try to help get initial interest when a story first hits the site. F'rinstance, I'll often separately tag a number of Mane Six characters that may appear in a story, since people may be more attracted to it if they know that character will feature to some extent.
But it looks like paring tags down to only characters/tags you think people would want to search for your story on is now important for after-market views.
2633595
Yeah, I figured that out while browsing through related stories. Heck, Bad Horse figured it out in like, five seconds.
Relevant works pretty well if you're looking for something like, say, stories about Applejack and Rarity kissing. It works very poorly for finding stories which are similar in other respects, though.
While 2633558 2633564 advance a plausible answer, I prefer to believe that the site recognizes when a user is suffering from a malaise of the soul characterized by undirected restlessness, and applies the most appropriate salve.
He gazed into the void, the abyss, that was nothingness...
... and it spat back saccharine sweetness in defiance.
Glory's pretty high up there too. That's a good story.
You may have the top entry for a blank search, but after taking a look myself, it seems I might be the only author special enough to have two stories on the first page of results!
Honestly, there are a lot of good stories on that list; if the theory that minimally-tagged stories are advantaged in a blank search is accurate, then I wonder if that suggests a correlation between quality and minimal tagging, or if it's just a coincidence.
EDIT: Nevermind, Obs is actually also on there multiple times. In fact, he's got three stories on the list.
DAMN YOU, OBS!!!
2633629
~From here
And if you're wondering, "Slanny" is Slaanesh from Warhammer 40k.
2633629 2633870
2633614
2633577
For some strange and bizarre reason, I was inspired to write this story
in a fit of madnessbased on this phenomenon.You people and your web 2.0 analysis skills and whatnot. Please keep up the good work
2633870
Very nice!
2633614
*cough cough changeling cough*
2633948
Aw, cool!
2634472 Thank you! Though I cannot take credit for writing that, as it'd been someone else. But you're certainly welcome to peruse the link, and enjoy some fun shenanigans in a Time Loop.
This is because you have the Buddha nature.
2635867
Eh, don't I wish...
also of note is that currently the second result is a Cold in Gardez story that uses the exact same picture of the library.
2640857
Coincidence?
Well, yes, but a neat one!
2633595 Scoring based on field length is a common part of pretty much every relevancy scorer. Tags are individual fields which match or don't, so the inbuilt relevancy calculations don't do anything because they're just filters. Therefore I have a little modifier based on tag count for scores. Obviously relevancy queries shouldn't be running for empty queries, it's something I forgot to remove. An empty relevance query it going to list you results by their scaling factor which has 2 contributors:
1. The aforementioned tag count penalty
2. The story's rating.
That's why you generally get good stories up there because it's pretty close to doing a top stories query.
2657070
It would be difficult to get a more authoritative opinion. Thanks for the info!