For web search rankings, how is rank merging usually done?

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

For coming up with webpage rankings, my understanding is that there is a query-specific score (such as how relevant a document is to the query that has been entered into the search engine) and a query-independent score (such as PageRank of the webpage, for example).

My question is, how could these two kinds">kinds of scores be merged in such a way that no one score dominates too much? My own thinking is that some kind of linear combination might work, but I'm not entirely sure.

If anyone can answer how it is done in practice, it would be great. If not, theoretical answers are also appreciated.