WONDERFUL! Just reporting back. This document is ACE http://wiki.apache.org/solr/AnalyzersTokenizersTokenFilters
For explaining what the filters are and how to affect the analyzer. Erik your statement "First, boosting isn't absolute" played on me so I continued to investigate boosting. I found this document that ( at last ) explains the dismax logic http://www.lucidimagination.com/blog/2010/05/23/whats-a-dismax/ The reason why I was not getting the order I require was due to: A) my boost metrics were too close together. b) similar id's in a document affected the score It seems that if a partial match is made the product ( a % of the total boost ) contributes to the documents score. This meant that one type of document in the index had a higher aggregate score due to the fact it had all but one of the boosted fields ( does not have parent_id ) in it and the fields where populated with content that was *very* similar to the requested id. for example required id = b011mg62 X_id = b011mgsf Due to the partial matching and closeness of the boost ranges this type of document always aquired a higher score than another document with just one matching field ( i.e. id field ). My solution was to increase the value of the fields I wanted to *really* count id^100000 parent_id^5000 brand_container_id^500 .... As a result even if there are similar matches in any field the id and parent_id matches should always receive a higher boost. This was also useful http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2179497/adding-date-boosting-to-complex-solr-queries Thanks for the help!
