Thanks for your thoughts, Chris. I agree with you about the user's
experience. Snooth doesn't serve any ads/sponsored results -- the
goal here is to make sure that the most recent document the user has
acted on shows up top in searches for recent activity. My aim is to
forcibly preserve the sort order until the document can be reindexed/
updated.
Since the dynamic field is too memory intensive, I'll try boosting on
the date field -- and boosting more on the date field for the
document that needs to be up top. If that doesn't end up working I'll
just perform two queries and be done with it.
Mark
On Oct 25, 2007, at 3:11 AM, Chris Hostetter wrote:
: The typical use case, though, is for the featured document to be
on top only
: for certain queries. Like in an intranet where someone queries
401K or
: retirement or similar, you want to feature a document about
benefits that
: would otherwise rank really low for that query. I have not be
able to make
: sorting strategies work very well.
this type of question typically falls into two use cases:
1) "targeted ads"
2) "sponsored results"
in the targeted ads case, the "special" matches aren't part of the
normal
flow of results, and don't fit into pagination -- they always
appera at
the top, or to the right, on every page, no matter what the
sort .... this
kind of usage doesn't really need any special logic, it can be
solved as
easily by a second Solr hit as it can by custom request handler logic.
in the "sponsored results" use case, the "special" matches should
appear
in the normal flow of results as the #1 (2, 3, etc) matches, so
that they
don't appear on page#2 ... but that also means that it's extremely
disconcerting for users if those matches are still at the top when the
userse resort. if a user is looking at product listings, sorted by
"relevancy" and the top 3 results all say they are "sponsered"
that's fine
... but if the user sort by "price" and those 3 results are still
at teh
top of the list, even though they clearly aren't the chepest,
that's just
going to piss the user off.
in my profesional opinion: don't fuck with your users. default to
whatever order you want, but if the user specificly requests to
sort the
results by some option, do it.
assuming you follow my professional opinion, then "boosting" docs
to have
an artifically high score will work fine.
if you absolutely *MUST* have certain docs "sorting" before others,
regardless of which sort option the user picks, then it is still
possible
do ... i'm hesitant to even say how, but if people insist on
knowing...
allways sort by score first, then by whatever field the user wants
to sort
by ... but when the user wants to sort on a specific field, move
the users
main query input into an "fq" (so it doesn't influence the
score) ... and
use an extremely low boost matchalldocs query along with your
"special doc
matching query" as the main (scoring) query param. the key being that
even though your primary sort is on score, every doc except your
special
matches have identical scores.
(this may not be possible with dismax because it's not trivial to move
the query into an fq, it might work if you can use "0" as the boost on
fields in the qf so it still dictates the matches but doesn't
influence
the score enough to throw off the sort)
-Hoss
mark angelillo
snooth inc.
o: 646.723.4328
c: 484.437.9915
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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