#115 backlink_factor seems to be broken

[Anonymous]

Redhat recommended version 3.2.0b4-102101 as a critical
update so I put it on my staging server to try it out.
I used htdig-web-3.2.0-1.b4.0.71.i386.rpm (I'm running
redhat linux version 7.1)

I updated my database and the results I started getting
weren't nearly as good as the last version. I started
changing the default values for factors to try to get
the results looking nice again. Here are the factors
that I'm using on my staging server that seem to get
good results:
backlink_factor: 1
description_factor: 100
meta_description_factor: 100
title_factor: 50
date_factor: 10
keywords_factor: 100
heading_factor_1: 20
heading_factor_2: 10
heading_factor_3: 5
heading_factor_4: 2
heading_factor_5: 1
heading_factor_6: 1
text_factor: 1

If I change the backlink_factor to anything greater
than 20 (It defaults to 1000) I get pages with only
*one* link to them dominating the results.

Please feel free to contact me if you need more
information, you would like a copy of my config file,
or you would like a copy of my database.

[Gilles Detillieux]

Logged In: YES
user_id=149687

There haven't been any changes that I can tell in the code between 3.2.0b3 and the October 24 snapshot of
3.2.0b4 (on which the Red Hat package is based) that would account for the behaviour you describe. It might
help if you provided some debugging info from htsearch, by running it with -v and with various
backlink_factor settings, to see what's going wrong with the backlink score calculation.