I am trying to build an application that has a smart adaptive search engine (lets say for cars). If I search for for 4x4 then the DB will return all the 4x4 cars I have (100 cars) - but as time goes by and I start checking out cars, liking them, commenting on them, etc the order of the search result should be the different. That means 1 month later when searching for 4x4, I should get the same result set ordered differently as per my previous interaction with the site. If I was mainly liking and commenting on German cars, BMW should be on the top and Land cruiser should be further down.

This ranking should be based on attributes that I captureduring user interaction (eg: car origin, user age, user location, car type[4x4, coupe, hatchback], price range). So for each car result I get, I will be weighing it based on how well it is performing on the 5 attributes above.

I intend to use the DB just as a repository and do the ranking and the thinking on the server. My question is, what kind of algorithm should I be using to weigh/rank my search result?

Thanks.