Have you tried running the queries through with &debugQuery=true? It may well be that, for certain documents, the lower-boosted fields are still overwhelming the contribution to scoring from the higher-boosted fields for the documents in question.
The problem is that index-time boosting is fairly inflexible, as you're finding out. You need to tweak the values to get satisfactory ranking, there's no good way to determine these theoretically. At best, boosting gives you "better" ranking. There's no guarantee at all that it'll give you all documents that match in the title field before all documents that match in the author field followed by all documents that match in the description field. You can approximate this behavior by upping your boosts (a lot, say 10000, 1000, 10) if that's truly your desire. Why are you using index time boosting? It has a different intent than query-time boosting (which you can do without dismax BTW, although you have to interpret the user's input). Are you sure you can't use dismax? HTH Erick On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 5:34 AM, phoey <pho...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Hi there, > > Im having some issues with my relevancy of some results. I have 5 fields, > with varying boost values and being copied into a copyfield "text" which is > used to be searched on > > > <field name="i_title" type="alphaOnlySort" indexed="true" stored="true" > omitNorms="false"/> > <field name="i_authors" type="text_ws" indexed="true" stored="true" > omitNorms="false"/> > <field name="i_subjects" type="text_ws" indexed="true" stored="true" > omitNorms="false"/> > <field name="i_features" type="text_ws" indexed="true" stored="true" > omitNorms="false"/> > <field name="i_description" type="text_ws" indexed="true" stored="true" > omitNorms="false"/> > > > <field name="text" type="text" indexed="true" stored="false" > multiValued="true" /> > ... > <copyField source="i_*" dest="text"/> > > im sending each of these fields with the boost values (i_title is 20, > i_authors is 10 ... i_description is 1) > > now the issue is that some items which the query matches in the description > field (which is boosted at 1) is scored higher than result for where the > query is matched in the authors field (which is boosted at 10). > > this leaves me to believe that the index time boost isn't working > correctly. > Have i omitted norms correctly? > > the score for one result which is matched by the author field is nearly the > same as the score for one result which is matched by the description field > so doubtful the boost is kept and is normalized when in the copyfield. > > Unfortunately i cannot switch to dismax parser at this late stage so cannot > do query time boosting unless theres another way of doing it on the > standard > parser. > > thanks > joe > > -- > View this message in context: > http://lucene.472066.n3.nabble.com/Index-time-boosting-tp1411105p1411105.html > Sent from the Solr - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com. >