The ranking factor calculated the average position of a place in an existing list relative to the size of the list.
To rank our list of best places for adventure travel in the world, we used 2 metrics. The first was the number of times each place had been recommended in our preliminary search. As expected, this introduced many ties. The second metric we introduced was a ranking factor. The ranking factor calculated the average position of a place in an existing list relative to the size of the list. For example, a place recommended at number 7 on an ascending list of 20 best adventure travel destinations would be given a value of 0.35. An average of all such values for a place were used as the ranking factor. By accumulating the ranking factors and frequency, we developed a scorecard. The list was then sorted in a descending order and the top 20 destinations were chosen as the best places for adventure travel in the world.