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Asked: 2026-05-19T04:05:12+00:00

Let’s say I have a Blog posts table that has a rating field which

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Let’s say I have a Blog posts table that has a rating field which indicates the quality of the post. What is the most efficient way to randomly find a post, with a higher chance of returning a highly ranked post?

I will be implementing this in PHP, MySQL, and possibly Lucene.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You could use a “weighted random” ordering, such as:

    SELECT title, body FROM posts ORDER BY (score+1) * RAND() DESC LIMIT 5

    The +1 is there to allow posts with 0 score to be selected. Depending on the average score of your post you may have to multiply the score by another constant factor (e.g. 0.5*score+1).

    Depending on the distribution of your scores you may want to transform your score, for instance with LOG(score) or SQRT(score).

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