[OPEN-ILS-DEV] ***SPAM*** Re: ***SPAM*** RE: ***SPAM*** a question/comment about relevance ranking

[Dan Scott]

On Thu, 2010-01-14 at 09:39 -0500, Soulliere, Robert wrote:
> Hi Melissa,
> 
> We were able to adjust our relevancy weights. It does require editing
> or adding records to a database table directly. 

Melissa's example search was "keyword: food society", and her goal was
to have records where those keywords appear in the title rank higher
than records where they appear in content notes or a corporate author
field (for example). You might expect someone to perhaps narrow their
search by running a title search instead of a keyword search in this
case, but that wasn't what Melissa was asking for (and in these days of
Solr-powered highly tweakable relevance searches, it's not what most
people expect).

As far as I have been able to determine, there is no way to adjust the
relevancy ranking for a keyword index using the out-of-the-box indexes
in Evergreen, even with the search.relevance_adjustment table. The
out-of-the-box keyword index is just one big indistinguishable blob of
words that doesn't distinguish between the keywords pulled from the
title, author, subjects, etc.

That said, I just published a blog post describing how I _did_ recently
accomplish Melissa's goal - at least partially - on our test server. We
haven't applied it to our production server yet, but given a bit more
testing we probably will. The blog post is at:
http://coffeecode.net/archives/218-Adjusting-relevancy-rankings-in-Evergreen-1.6,-some-explorations.html (http://ur1.ca/q7ud if you like short URLs). More thoughts on this matter would certainly be appreciated.