Hello folks, We're trying to use Lucene's scoring to do a fairly basic thing: give a document (in this case, we index "articles") a boost based on an integer value that we know at index-time. We want the document boost to affect the final document score linearly.
We thought that assigning a document boost based on this value would do the trick, but the behavior we're seeing doesn't match what we expect given the online documentation. In fact, we see that a linear increase in document boost yields an exponential increase in the 'fieldNorm' component of the score for each term of the query that matched the document. Here's a small table of values that relate the document boost we pass in to the fieldNorm contribution returned by Lucene: boost fieldNorm 1.0 0.3125 = (5/16, 2^-1.678) 2.0 20.0 = (2^4.3219, 2^1 * 10) 3.0 256.0 = (2^8) 4.0 1280.0 = (2^10.3219, 2^7 * 10) 5.0 5120.0 = (2^12.3219, 2^9 * 10) 6.0 16384.0 = (2^14.0) 7.0 40960.0 = (2^15.3219, 2^12 * 10) 8.0 81920.0 = (2^16.3219, 2^13 * 10) 10.0 327680.0 = (2^18.3219, 2^15 * 10) This example is using a query with two terms against a document that contains those terms and a few others, in one searchable field. Is this the way document boost is supposed to work? Or have we misconfigured something? If we cannot use document boost to affect scoring linearly, is there some other technique we can use? By the way, we're using SOLR to access Lucene. We can give more information if necessary, such as our SOLR schema.xml, if folks think that would help explain things. Let us know what other information we can provide. Thanks, Mike
