The default query parser in Solr does not handle precedence of Boolean operators in the way most people expect.
"A AND B OR C" gets interpreted as "A AND (B OR C)" . There are numerous other examples in the JIRA ticket for Lucene 167, this article on the wiki http://wiki.apache.org/lucene-java/BooleanQuerySyntax and in this blog post: http://robotlibrarian.billdueber.com/solr-and-boolean-operators/ This issue was reported in 2003 but the fix does not seem to have made it into the default query parser for either Lucene or Solr It appears that Lucene 167 was closed in 2009 based on the assumption that the query parser in Lucene 1823 would become the default Lucene query parser. However 1823 seems to have gotten bogged down and is not yet resolved. I do see that there is a precedence query parser in LUCENE-1937 which was committed to contrib. in the 3x branch:(http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/lucene/dev/branches/branch_3x/lucene/contrib/queryparser/src/java/org/apache/lucene/queryParser/precedence/package.html?view=co) Would it be possible to use the contrib 3x precedence query parser in Solr? Would this require modifying the LuceneQParserPlugin and if so would it make sense to open a JIRA issue? Are there any plans to make the precedence query parser the default for either Lucene or Solr? If not, are there any plans to make it more prominent in the documentation that the default Lucene query parser has issues with precedence? A bit more background below Tom Burton-West http://www.hathitrust.org/blogs/large-scale-search ---------------------------------------------------- More Background There were some concerns about breaking backward compatibility but in a mailing list post in 2005 Yonik Sealy said: "The current behavior is so surprising that I doubt that no one is relying on it." (http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg00018.html) and Doug Cutting said "+1. Fixing operator precedence seems to me like an acceptable incompatibility. The change needs to be well documented in release notes, and the old QueryParser should be available, deprecated, for a time for back-compatibility." (http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg00037.html)
