: frequently get queried for "The Doors". Articles and prepositions : (the stuff of good stop-lists) seem to me to be in a fuzzier class -- : use 'em if you have 'em during matching, but don't kill your queries : because of them. Hence some desire to make them in some way : "optional" during matching.
sure, but what logic would you suggest be used to decide when to make them optional? :) based on your problem description (which was excellent by the way ... questions full of details are so great, you never have to worry that you are missunderstanding the problem) the best suggestion i can give is one that i usually discourage: execute multiple queries. start by hitting Solr using a qf with fields that contain stop words. if you get 0 hits, then query with a qf that contains all fields that don't have stop words in them, (but you can leave them in pf). In an ideal world, the DisMax handler would let you specify N qf options, and each one would be used to build a separate DisjunctionMaxQuery and then they'd all be combined into the uber BooleanQuery as optional clauses -- but in the absense of that, two queries is probably your best bet. (hmmm... actually qf is currently a single value param -- multiple values aren't supported -- so if someone wrote a patch to do something like i described it would be backward compatible ... anybody interested?) -Hoss
