Optimize Apache Solr boost Factors:
The problem to solve:
- When running search indexes with Solr, you might stumble upon is that you have various fields in your documents and you’ve to adjust their weights to get reasonable results.
- Finding those “boosting” values can be quite complex when you have many fields and many scenarios.
- Usually getting the values right is a task for very experienced integrators.
- Looking at it from a more technical perspective – when your Solr query looks like the one above, the question you’ve to answer is how the values for the highlighted numbers should look like to get reasonable results.
Measuring “reasonable”:
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- In order to solve the problem answer what we expect the outcome to look like.
- In other words, we’ve to measure how reasonable a specific solution is.
- For a search engine this can be done with some sample queries and some expectations along with that.
- The expectation could come in a form that we explicitly tell which documents we expect in the result lists of specific queries (and at predefined positions).
- We can simple test agains the expectations and check whether or not specific boost factor values actually satisfy them.