Oracle 'Contains' / 'Group' function return incorrect value - sql

Question

I have this query:
SELECT last_name, SCORE(1)
FROM Employees
WHERE CONTAINS(last_name, '%sul%', 1) > 0
It produces output below:
The question is:
Why does the SCORE(1) produce 9? As I recall that CONTAINS function returns number of occurrences of search_string (in this case '%sul%').
I expect the output should be:
Sullivan 1
Sully 1
But when I try this syntax:
SELECT last_name, SCORE(1)
FROM Employees
WHERE CONTAINS(last_name, 'sul', 1) >0;
It returns 0 rows selected.
And can someone please explain me what is the third parameter for?
Thanks in advance :)

Answer 1

The reason your second query is returning no rows is, you are looking for word sul in your search. Contains will not do pattern search unless you tell it to, it searches for words which you specified as your second paramter. To look for patterns, you will have to use wildcards, as you did in your first example.
Now, coming to the third parameter in CONTAINS - it is label and is just used to label the score operator. You should use the third parameter when you use SCORE in your SELECT list. It's importance is more clear when there are multiple SCORE operators
Quoting directly from documentaion
label
Specify a number to identify the score produced by the query.
Use this number to identify the CONTAINS clause which returns this
score.
Example
Single CONTAINS
When the SCORE operator is called (for example, in a SELECT clause),
the CONTAINS clause must reference the score label value as in the
following example:
SELECT SCORE(1), title from newsindex
WHERE CONTAINS(text, 'oracle', 1) > 0 ORDER BY SCORE(1) DESC;
Multiple CONTAINS
Assume that a news database stores and indexes the title and body of
news articles separately. The following query returns all the
documents that include the words Oracle in their title and java in
their body. The articles are sorted by the scores for the first
CONTAINS (Oracle) and then by the scores for the second CONTAINS
(java).
SELECT title, body, SCORE(10), SCORE(20) FROM news WHERE CONTAINS
(news.title, 'Oracle', 10) > 0 OR CONTAINS (news.body, 'java', 20) > 0
ORDER BY SCORE(10), SCORE(20);

Answer 2

The Oracle Text Scoring Algorithm does not score by simply counting the number of occurrences. It uses an inverse frequency algorithm based on Salton's formula.
Inverse frequency scoring assumes that frequently occurring terms in a document set are noise terms, and so these terms are scored lower. For a document to score high, the query term must occur frequently in the document but infrequently in the document set as a whole.
Think of a google search. If you search for the term Oracle you will not find (directly) any result that may help to explain your scoring value questioning, so we can consider this term a "noise" to your expectations. But if you search for the term Oracle Text Scoring Algorithm you will find your answer in the first google result.
And about your other questionings, I think that #Incognito already gives them a good answer.