Boosts Considered Harmful – adventures with badly configured search

During a recent client visit we encountered a common problem in search - over-application of 'boosts', which can be used to weight the influence of matches in one particular field. For example, you might sensibly use this to make results that match a query on their title field come higher in search results. However in this case we saw huge boost values used (numbers in the hundreds) which were probably swamping everything else - and it wasn't at all clear where the values had come from, be it ex...Continue reading

Can you make a contribution to Apache Solr core development?

As any regular reader of this blog will be aware, we use almost exclusively open source software on customer projects. To meet their requirements, we often have to extend the functionality of the software (e.g. XJOIN in Solr). As far as possible, with the agreement of the customer, we like to then contribute these changes b...Continue reading