: Making an arbitrary cuttoff mean something would be quite difficult. The specifics on this are discussed in the Lucene Java FAQ...
http://wiki.apache.org/jakarta-lucene/LuceneFAQ#head-912c1f237bb00259185353182948e5935f0c2f03 : > But searches in the vbulletin database returns an awful lots of hits(like : > 100.000+ for some queries), even though perhaps only the first handful seem : > relevant. So ideally we would like the link to say "Found 12 extra results : > in vbulletin", if the first 12 results had a high score, and result 13 to : > 100.000 had a low score. the reasl question is, are ou just going to display that text, or is it going to be a link to the actual search: if you've going to give the user a link, then you're going to want to make sure the page they get to matches up with their expecation from the link text, so saying there are only 12 results when there are really 100.000 is going to be a bold faced lie -- what you should do is re-evaluate your query structure so that you only get the really good results (the 12) and have optional UI elements allowing people to relax the search criteria to get the full 100K. what criteria you should use to keep the results set small really depends on how you define "good" results" vs "bad" results. -Hoss
