A method is provided for selecting relevant documents returned from a search query. When a search engine finds search terms in documents, the document score is based on the frequency of the occurrence of those terms, the category of the term, and the section of the document in which the term is found. Each (category type, document section) pair is assigned a weight that is used to modify the contribution of term frequency. The weights are determined in an offline process using historical data and human validation. Through this empirical process, the weight assignments are made to correlate high relevance scores with documents that humans would find relevant to a search query.