I also did some separate research, and determined partly from postings in various forums, and partly from tests, that the scoring algorithm is not influenced by close repetition of the search phrase. So the addition of multiple mentions of a given phrase (say by repeated paste) actually has practically no impact on the results. Which seems to nullify the "tfi,j" term in the formula.

I also found that the number of search term mentions inside the document is only part of the reasoning for the ranking. It's also affected by:

The size of the document itself. The place in the document the hits are found. And as I just noted, how close together in the document the hits are found. The reasoning that occurrences near the start and near the end are emphasised slightly has to do with the possible presence of management summaries at the start of the document, and conclusion paragraphs towards the end.

What I don't know, is how much of the document constitutes "near the start" or "near the end". Or how much such occurrences influence the result. Apparently not much--one or two percentage points was what my testing showed.

The proportion of documents in the database that contain the hit, or the "dfi" term in the TFIDF formula, also influences the ranking. And finally, possibly (I can't be sure here) the size of the document in proportion to the sizes of other documents also affects the result.

Full text indexing
How do you get hold of the Full Text Indexing parameters for an existing database--those that are shown in the FT Properties?

This response comes from John Curtis. "Hmm, these aren't exposed in the API. Which means you can't." Which to my mind is a pity.

Wildcard searches
How can I search for strings that actually contain the wildcard "*" and "?" characters?

Try Quotes? No, that doesn't work. That's not intentional.

Address returns from Directory Assistance
I have a number of Notes domains, each of which has access to the directories of the others via Directory Assistance. These domains are connected for Notes purposes over slow connections, which I use for replication of the directories. Each has a high-speed SMTP connection to the Internet, and I use that for mail. However, selecting names from the secondary directories via Directory Assistance returns only the Notes name of the addressee, and not the SMTP address. There are then problems with routing the mail. How can I get the addressee's SMTP address returned from DA to route the mail directly over the Internet?

I asked this question two, if not three years in a row, and never really got much of an answer. Events actually overtook it from the point of the specific issue I wanted to solve, in that we eventually got access to the high-speed Internet connection for Notes use, and I started to replicate and do Notes mail routing that way. But maybe someone out there still has the problem?

Conclusion
Of course, the Lotusphere "Meet the Developers" isn't the only way to get these questions asked, but it's a great way to have a discussion about the issues. You can always ask questions on the Notes.Net (Lotus DeveloperWorks) forums, and I'd recommend that as a way of getting answers a bit more quickly than waiting for January and a trip to Orlando, as appetizing as that sounds. But if you're happy to wait, it's a great way to learn. And if you can't get to Lotusphere, tell us your key question. We'll make a list over the course of the year, and we'll ask the Developers. We can't guarantee to ask them all, but we will ask the ones we think are most interesting.

David Gewirtz is the author of How To Save Jobs and Where Have All The Emails Gone? For more than 20 years, he has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and is a member of the instructional faculty at the University of California, Berkeley extension. He can be reached at david@zatz.com and you can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/DavidGewirtz.