Abstract: To solve the problem of over many results obtained from a Web database through an approximate query, an automated ranking method was first proposed for those results, taking advantages of the KL distance, PIR model and query history to formulate a tuple scoring function. According to the satisfiabilities of specified attribute values in result tuple to the initial query and the relevance of unspecified attribute values to users' preference, the scoring function evaluates the scores of ranked tuples. Experimental results demonstrated that the automated ranking method proposed can meet the users' requirements and their preference effectively with high efficiency.