When numbers are important to your organization

I was contacted recently by a financial organization which had issues with the sorting of their search results using FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint. The issue was that when including year numbers in the search query, they were not given any relevance while ranking the search results.

A typical query could be income statement 2010, but the top results returned documents for 2006.

Clearly the year number 2010 was being excluded from ranking the results, and terms excluded by rank indicate stop word threshold issues.