: Isn't there a better way to take the information into account but still : normalize? taking the score of only one of the fields doesn't sound like the : best thing to do (it's basically ignoring part of the information).
note the word "mostly" in Mike's response about dismax ... the "tie" param lets you decide how much the other fields influence the score. Try it, it works really well ... trust me/us. For the record: i'm really not sure what your question is ... you say you want to normalize for the fact that some docs don't have a value in some fields, but you don't want to combine the fields because it will skew the statistics ... isn't that "skewing" exactly what you are trying to achieve? don't you need to introduce some "skew" in favor of hte docs that don't have a value for field2 to compensate forr the existing "counter skew" they already have? -Hoss
