The pathlen attribute corresponds to the proximity between words of the query found in matching documents. In other terms, it corresponds to the shortest distance found in the document between query words. It ranks higher the documents where words are close to each other.
Example
Query: "Anakin Skywalker"
- "Anakin Skywalker" is better than "Anakin is the boy of the Skywalker family".
This attribute ranks documents in ascending order.