Hi all, I'm trying to implement "sponsored results" in Solr search results similar to that of Google. We index products from various sites and would like to allow certain sites to promote their products. My approach is to query a slave instance to get sponsored results for user queries in addition to the normal search results. This part is easy. However, since the number of products indexed for each sites can be very different (100, 1000, 10000 or 60000 products), we need a way to fairly distribute the sponsored results among sites.
My initial thought is utilising field collapsing patch to collapse the search results on siteId field. You can imagine that this will create a series of "buckets of results", each bucket representing results from a site. After that, 2 or 3 buckets will randomly be selected from which I will randomly select one or two results from. However, since I want these sponsored results to be relevant to user queries, I'd like only want to have the first 30 results in each buckets. Obviously, it's desirable that if the user refreshes the page, new sponsored results will be displayed. On the other hand, I also want to have the advantages of Solr cache. What would be the best way to implement this functionality? Thanks. Cheers, Cuong
