A system and related techniques permit a search service operator to access
a variety of disparate relevance measures, and integrate those measures
into idealized or unified data sets. A search service operator may employ
self-learning networks to generate relevance rankings of Web site hits in
response to user queries or searches, such as Boolean text or other
searches. To improve the accuracy and quality of the rankings of results,
the service provider may accept as inputs relevance measures created from
query logs, from human-annotated search records, from independent
commercial or other search sites, or from other sources and feed those
measures to a normalization engine. That engine may normalize those
relevance ratings to a common scale, such as quintiles, percentages or
other scales or levels. The provider may then use that idealized or
normalized combined measure to train the search algorithms or heuristics
to arrive at more accurate results.