title: What's the best way to normalize scores for ranking things?
body: <p>I'm curious how to do normalizing of numbers for a ranking algorithm</p>
  
  <p>let's say I want to rank a link based on importance and I have two columns to work with </p>
  
  <p>so a table would look like</p>
  
  <p>url | comments | views</p>
  
  <p>now I want to rank comments higher than views so I would first think to do comments*3 or something to weight it, however if there is a large view number like 40,000 and only 4 comments then the comments weight gets dropped out. </p>
  
  <p>So I'm thinking I have to normalize those scores down to a more equal playing field before I can weight them. Any ideas or pointers to how that's usually done?</p>
  
  <p>thanks</p>