Faceted navigation apps on ni.com (like Search, DevZone, Manuals, KB and others) use our enterprise search engine to deliver documents. Regardless of whether you enter a keyword or not the search engine always tries to deliver the most relevant documents. Here are factors the relevancy algorithm takes into consideration:

1. Document age - newer documents rank better. A one year old document gets about half the "points" compared to a new document.
2. Document language - documents that match your language rank better. The language is based on your country/language selection in Global Gateway. If you haven't set your preference the search engine will identify your country and language based on your IP address.
3. Document ratings - documents with better user ratings rank better. Whenever applicable the algorithm uses the document rating (1 to 5), number of those ratings, number of answered questions, number of service requests linked to the document to evaluate document quality. We are also experimenting with number of visits and downloads.

However, if you do happen to provide a keyword or two there is a little more to be considered.

1. Frequency of the search query in title (45), headings (10), body (5), URL (30), description metatag (5) and keywords metatag (10). The numbers in parentheses represent weight of that factor. Higher number means more "points".
2. Categorization - if the document has assigned categories (such as product, industry, application, technology...) that match the query string the document gets points for it. The relative weight of this factor is 15.
3. Inbound links - anchor text that contains the searched keywords helps document rank better. Especially if the anchor text is an exact match of the query.

The search engine runs all the above (and few more things) through a complex formula to score the documents. Typical document gets anywhere between 8,000 to 12,000 points. More points means higher position in the results.  While the web team at National Instruments uses a third-party search engine, we do control the algorithm by which the search engine scores documents.