: I don't think that will solve the relevance issues, given that the IDF : (described at : http://lucene.zones.apache.org:8080/hudson/job/Lucene-Nightly/javadoc/org/apache/lucene/search/Similarity.html) : is per document, not per field. In the end, though, it may be negligible.
well .. yes, but every "Term" has a specific field, so if if each differnet type of document used completely different fields there would be no "idf poisining" across types. you would still have the sorting issue ... but: a) given enough ram and few enough sort fields it's not a big deal. b) sorting fields may actually be generic enough that they could be common to more then one types (ie: "datePosted", "price", etc...) -Hoss
