The setup for this question was to simplify the actual environment, we're not actually demoting popular authors.
Perhaps index-time (negative) boosts are indeed the only way. -- IntelCompute Web Design and Online Marketing http://www.intelcompute.com -----Original Message----- From: Chris Hostetter <hossman_luc...@fucit.org> Reply-to: solr-user@lucene.apache.org To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org Subject: Re: negative boosts for docs with common field value Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2011 15:37:03 -0700 (PDT) : Some searches will obviously be saturated by docs from any given author if : they've simply written more. : : I'd like to give a negative boost to these matches, there-by making sure that : 1 Author doesn't saturate the results just because they've written 500 : documents, compared to others who may have only written 2-3 documents. : : The actual author value doesn't matter, I just want to bring down the score of : docs by any common author to give more varied results. : : What's the easiest approach for this, and is it even possible at query time? : I could do this at index time but would prefer a Solr solution. w/o a custom plugin, the only way i know of to do something like this would be to index a numeric "author_prolificness" field in each doc and use that as the basis of a function query. but honestly: i *really* don't think you want to do this - not if you are dealing with real user queries (maybe if this is for some syntheticly generated "related documents" or "interesting documents" query) Imagine a user is searching for a *very* specific title (ie: "Nightfall") by a very prolific author ("Isaac Asimov). What your'e describing would penalize the desired match just because the author is prolific -- even if the user types in the exact title of a document, so that some much more esoteric document with the same title by an author who has written nothing else ("Stephen Leather") would likely score higher. I mean: if someone types in "Romeo and Juliet" do you really want to score documents by "Shakespeare" lower then documents by "Stanley W. Wells" just because Wells has written fewer total books? -Hoss
