Hello, > > Michael McCandless wrote: > > The upcoming Lucene in Action revision (now available online through Manning's MEAP) has a basic example of this (boosting by recency) in the Advanced Search chapter, using function queries. >
I have never used function queries before, but it was very easy to boost more recent documents with help of FieldScoreQuery. This may be quite common usage. The result is based on computation during search time but the same result would be accomplished using document boost during indexing time (and certainly faster with less memory used). But there is a difference - document boost is used to compute document's norm value which is stored with precision loss (float encoded as byte). The question: Is still really an issue to encode norms as bytes? Do we lose less than we gain? Can someone imagine any real disadvantages of storing norms as full 4-bytes float? Nowadays? Best regards, Jiri Kuhn.
