: I am talking about field boosting rather than document boosting, ie. I : would like some fields (say eg. title) to be "louder" than others, : across ALL documents. I believe you are at least partially talking : about document boosting, which clearly applies on a per-document basis.
index time boosts are all the same -- it doesn't matter if htey are field boosts or document boosts -- a document boost is just a field boost for every field in the document. : If it helps, consider a schema version of the following, from : org.apache.solr.common.SolrInputDocument: : : /** : * Adds a field with the given name, value and boost. If a field with : the name already exists, then it is updated to : * the new value and boost. : * : * @param name Name of the field to add : * @param value Value of the field : * @param boost Boost value for the field : */ : public void addField(String name, Object value, float boost ) ... : Where a constant boost value is applied consistently to a given field. : That is what I was mistakenly hoping to achieve in the schema. I still : think it would be a good idea BTW. Regards, But now we're right back to what i was trying to explain before: index time boost values like these are only used as a multiplier in the fieldNorm. when included as part of the document data, you can specify a fieldBoost for fieldX of docA that's greater then the boost for fieldX of docB and that will make docA score higher then docB when fieldX contains the same number of matches and is hte same length -- but if you apply a constant boost of B to fieldX for every doc (which is what a feature to hardcode boosts in schema.xml might give you) then the net effect would be zero when scoring docA and docB, because the fieldNorm's for fieldX in both docs would include the exact same multiplier. -Hoss