I have a requirement to spotlight certain results if the query text exactly
matches the title or see reference (indexed by me as alttitle_t).
What that means is that these matching results are shown above the
top-10/20 list with different CSS and fields. Its like feeling lucky on
google :)
I have considered three ways of implementing this:
1. Assume that edismax qf/pf will boost these results to be first when
there is an exact match on these important fields. The downside then is
that my relevancy is constrained and I must maintain my configuration with
title and alttitle_t as top search fields (see XML snippet below). I may
have to overweight them to achieve the "always first" criteria. Another
less major downside is that I must always return the spotlight summary
field (for display) and the image to display on each search. These could
be got from a database by the id, however, it is convenient to get them
from Solr.
2. Issue two searches for every user search, and use a second set of
parameters (change the search type and fields to search only by exact
matching a specific string field spottitle_s). The search for the
spotlight can then have its own configuration. The downside here is that
I am using Django and pysolr for the front-end, and pysolr is both
synchronous and tied to the requestHandler named "select". Convention.
Of course, running in parallel is not a fix-all - running a search takes
some time, even if run in parallel.
3. Automate the population of elevate.xml so that all these 959 queries
are here. This is probably best, but forces me to restart/reload when
there are changes to this components. The elevation can be done through a
query.
What I'd love to do is to configure the "select" requestHandler to run both
searches and return me both sets of results. Is there anyway to do that -
apply the same q= parameter to two configured way to run a search?
Something like sub queries?
I suspect that approach 1 will get me through my demo and a brief
evaluation period, but that either approach 2 or 3 will be the winner.
Here's a snippet from my current qf/pf configuration:
<str name="qf">
title^100
alttitle_t^100
...
text
</str>
<str name="pf">
title^1000
alttitle_t^1000
...
text^10
</str>
Thanks,
Dan Davis
