Discussion: How should search results be ranked 📃?

[sabbamitta]

@Snowbird

then the recommending just stopped

As far as I know all MN and DN suttas have one of the icons*, and all other suttas don’t have them—or am I wrong? (* I checked again, and this is indeed the case; so using them for ranking search results just means ranking MN and DN at the top.)

And I also understood that they were not meant to say that these suttas are any more valuable than others, but just to give a grouping within these Nikayas about the level of expertise recommended for reading them. Basically, so that a newcomer doesn’t start with MN 1 and get frustrated.

That’s why I didn’t first know what you mean by “recommendation”.

And the absence of an icon I didn’t understand as meaning this sutta is less valuable, but that it’s not easy to group it in a category between beginners and advanced readers. Or that simply no-one found the time to do it.

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Added:
On the SC licences page we find:

We use several icons from the Noun Project, kindly released via Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 3.0 US) .

• “Difficulty” icons created by Alena Artemova.

So they are not meant to indicate value, but difficulty.

They are also mentioned in the same sense here:

@sujato

In DN and MN (and maybe other places), we can add a “difficulty” icon in the form of a sapling, potted plant, and tree. This guides a new reader. Title attributes explain the meaning. Low priority.