Hi John, > Almost all search in the world today sorts results by relevance (e.g. > Google), so I suspect people will be familiar with the concept. Of > course that doesn't mean the relevance is very meaningful. > > If we don't sort the results by PyLucene relevance, what do we sort them > by? The obvious options include one of our columns in the table or some > new column. Which would you choose?
In playing around with search briefly, I haven't found the PyLucene relevance to bear much relationship to how I'd expect relevance to be weighted. For instance, when welcome is searched for, an item who's entire contents is a title of "Welcome welcome welcome" is sorted last (among several items containing the word welcome), which seemed pretty odd to me. When I search for "Welcome in both", the item titled "Welcome in both" comes up significantly lower ranked than other items that have neither "in" nor "both" in their title or body. So while I love the idea of getting search by relevance, I think I'd be frustrated by the hint that relevance was a factor in my searches if I didn't believe the relevance scores were accurate. Probably making it better would take some tweaking and testing of the parameters we're handing to PyLucene. I'd lean towards sorting and sectioning by triage status for now, unless other people's experience with this is better than mine. Sincerely, Jeffrey _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Open Source Applications Foundation "Design" mailing list http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/design
