searching docs

[Matthew Nuzum]

Hi team,

I'm working on the implementation of the search engine for the ubuntu
websites. During some discussions I've had with various people in the
community I've decided to weight the search results so that official
quality controlled documentation is more likely to be shown above
information that receives less qc.

I'd like to not focus on technical implementation matters but instead
focus on the weighting. Here are my two questions:

First, do we need more than one search results page:
 1. A help results page that weights results as listed below - people
use this when search for help
 2. A general results page people use this when searching the other
areas of the website

My brain has grown fuzzy on this topic and having two search engine
results sometimes seems to make perfect sense and at other times
sounds like the dumbest hair brained idea I've ever conceived. What
are your thoughts, can you think come up with a use case where the
help results would be less than ideal for someone searching on one of
the ubuntu sites (not the forums).

Second, tell me what you think about the weighting:

Think of the weights as a percentage. 1 is the highest, 0 is the lowest.

help.ubuntu.com     1
forums.ubuntu.com 0.8
lists.ubuntu.com   0.8
wiki.ubuntu.com   0.6
www.ubuntu.com   0.6
answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/   0.4
packages.ubuntu.com    0.3
bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/   0.2

Site's that aren't listed will be excluded from the search results,
can you think of any I've missed?
-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode