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Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1) - Cite This Source - Share This

rel·e·vant

Audio Help [rel-uh-vuh

nt] Pronunciation Key

–adjective

bearing upon or connected with the matter in hand; pertinent: a relevant remark.

[Origin: 1550–60; < ML relevant- (s. of relevāns), special use of L, prp. of relevāre to raise, lift up. See relieve, -ant

]

—Related forms

rel·e·vance, rel·e·van·cy, noun

rel·e·vant·ly, adverb

—Synonyms applicable, germane, apposite, appropriate, suitable, fitting. See apt.

—Pronunciation note See irrelevant.

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1)
Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006.

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
relevance

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American Heritage Dictionary - Cite This Source - Share This

rel·e·vance Audio Help (rěl'ə-vəns) Pronunciation Key
n.

Pertinence to the matter at hand.
Applicability to social issues: a governmental policy lacking relevance.
Computer Science The capability of a search engine or function to retrieve data appropriate to a user's needs.

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The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2006 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

WordNet - Cite This Source - Share This

relevance
noun
the relation of something to the matter at hand [ant: irrelevance]

Free On-line Dictionary of Computing - Cite This Source - Share This

relevance information science
A measure of how closely a given object (file, web page, database record, etc.) matches a user's search for information.
The relevance algorithms used in most large web search engines today are based on fairly simple word-occurence measurement: if the word "daffodil" occurs on a given page, then that page is considered relevant to a query on the word "daffodil"; and its relevance is quantised as a factor of the number of times the word occurs in the page, on whether "daffodil" occurs in title of the page or in its META keywords, in the first N words of the page, in a heading, and so on; and similarly for words that a stemmer says are based on "daffodil".
More elaborate (and resource-expensive) relevance algorithms may involve thesaurus (or synonym ring) lookup; e.g. it might rank a document about narcissuses (but which may not mention the word "daffodil" anywhere) as relevant to a query on "daffodil", since narcissuses and daffodils are basically the same thing. Ditto for queries on "jail" and "gaol", etc.
More elaborate forms of thesaurus lookup may involve multilingual thesauri (e.g. knowing that documents in Japanese which mention the Japanese word for "narcissus" are relevant to your search on "narcissus"), or may involve thesauri (often auto-generated) based not on equivalence of meaning, but on word-proximity, such that "bulb" or "bloom" may be in the thesaurus entry for "daffodil".
Word spamming essentially attempts to falsely increase a web page's relevance to certain common searches.
See also subject index.
(1997-04-09)