How to explain Lucene's ranking algorithm to someone who is not technical?

2021-04-19 Thread Steven White
Hi everyone, If you are asked to explain how Lucene's algorithm works, to someone who is not technical and doesn't understand math, how do you go about doing so? I'm going to list what I see as key points to use but please correct me where correction is needed and do add where addition is needed.

Re: Backward compatibility of FST50 and UniformSplit formats

2021-04-19 Thread Adrien Grand
Hi Dmitry, These codecs are indeed not backward compatible. Only the default codec is guaranteed to be backward compatible. If you would like to bring your index to a snapshot of the main branch, one option would be to: 1. Use Lucene 8.5's IndexWriter#addIndexes in order to create a copy of your

Re: How to explain Lucene's ranking algorithm to someone who is not technical?

2021-04-19 Thread Adrien Grand
1. This isn't true. Your query has 10 terms. A document that poorly matches all 10 terms will rank lower than a document that has great matches for 9 of the 10 terms. However it's true that having more matches usually correlates with better scores since the final score of a boolean query is the sum