Your first and biggest problem will be to define "good" result ordering. You have some anecdotal statements that amount to something like "sometimes I don't like the results". But unless you can quantify this, you'll spend a LOT of time going tweaking the results ordering and then going back and re-tweaking based on another result....
But to your point. the 4x boosting is actually rather high. You might be able to get better results by boosting by significantly smaller values, say 1.5 or something. But under any circumstances, _some_ searches will not be satisfactory, I guess it's up to you to figure out what's about "the best you can do"... Wish I had better answers, but judgement calls are like that <G>.. Best Erick On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 5:28 PM, Tavi Nathanson <tavi.nathan...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hey everyone, > > I field documents by "title" and "body". The title field often has far fewer > terms than the body field. IDF, as a result, will have a profound effect in > the title field compared to the body field. > > I currently have the title field boosted by 4x relative to the body field. > While I want matches in the title field to result in higher scores than > matches in the body field, I don't believe I want the title to completely > trump the body. I've seen this happen when a rare term is present in the > title field, and IDF combines with the 4x boost to wreak havoc. > > I'd like to get your thoughts on the following: > > - Is it standard practice to avoid boosting the title field much, because of > the (generally) high IDF of title field terms? > - Are there other strategies for handling the high IDF of a title field? > > Thanks! > > -- > View this message in context: > http://lucene.472066.n3.nabble.com/Title-Boosting-and-IDF-tp3936709p3936709.html > Sent from the Solr - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
