: 1. Each piece is still subject to the IDF component of the score, : requiring me to make each individual category have a boost factoring : that in. For example, if I want meta:promote to be twice as boosted as : category:featured, I can't simply boost the first to 2 and the second to : 1 (the default) -- I have enable debugQuery and carefully skew them : appropriately to what I want. And the IDF might change as the data : changes.
right, getting anything close to an "absolute" effect is neraly impossible -- but with custom similarities and omit norms/tf the complexities can be reduced. most relevant to this discussion however: this isn't a specific shortcoming of bq -- you'd have the same problem if you used the bf or boost params with these type of "flag" boosts as well. : 2. It still ads instead of multiplies which is always what I want. : (should I not always want it?) i think in general multiplication makes a lot more sense, but YMMV. the one hitch with always using multiplcation is that it always has the same relative impact on the scores -- regardless of what the main query was or what the range of scores was. but an additive boost can have more or less impact depending on the weighting of hte main query. Specificly: query time changes to boost values in the "qf" and "pf" params can make default "bq" and "bf" params more or less important, but a "boost" param wouldn't care, it will always be a multiplier. : use. The only way I know to give a fielded query a constant score is a : range query which is a total hack, e.g. meta:[promote TO promote] which : you could then boost. Ick! That's an interesting point ... I don't think we have any nice generic way to let users make any arbitrary query be a constant scoring query. (you can use a "0" boost, but then the constant score is "0") ... that would probably be a pretty trivial QParser to write though ... hmmm. -Hoss
