Question

We’re having issues with non relevant results being returned as the highest results in our search and we’re trying to improve that behavior, but not really sure how.

We have SearchIndex with about a dozen fields. The document=True field is a template backed field that we have placed the majority of the content into. Some of the stuff found in there is much less relevant than other stuff, even if it’s still useful.

To give a concrete example: if a user searches for “red rose”, we want to return red roses as the top results…even better if lower results are just roses or just red, or even are described as being “rose red” in color.

The issue is our document=True field has a ton of items that are described as being “rose red”. Worse the actual red roses don’t have “red” and “rose” particularly close to each other as those values would come from disparate fields. As a result we get the top few hundred results that are completely irrelevant.

What we would like to do is either:

A. Search the primary document and then search each of our other fields and boost (but not hard filter) accordingly. If the term “rose” appears in one of the items names and “red” appears as one of it’s attribute values than that result should have a higher score. This gives us the optimal results in theory sorted by relevancy.

B. Search all fields at once and boost if the value is any of the “boosted” fields.

It seems like using field boost should be the answer, but we can’t figure out how to express it since filtering based on a field is a harsh exclude and we want it to only impact the relevance scoring.

The result of both of these is effectively the same. We just can’t figure out how to do either of them with Haystack. Or if we’d have to fall back to raw queries how to write a solr query that accomplishes this.

Answer 1

I can give you some pointers, as I did not get the exact use case :-

You can check on Solr edismax query parser to configure:-

1. Fields you want to search on – Mainly to select the results
2. Variable boost on fields for relevancy – To determine the importance on fields
3. Variable boost for different words combination e.g. single words, phrase match, shingle match with slop to determine relevancy
4. Provide additional boost on other fields

This will help you to filter the results and order them accordingly as per the field and word combination matches