<div dir="ltr">Olly,<br><br>We currently use Sphinx for our website search function, but we're planning on using Xapian instead for a few of the extra features it has. Our website is written in Ruby on Rails, so of course we're using Xapian with Ruby bindings. I don't know if you're familiar with Sphinx but Sphinx allows you to pass a sort expression when you execute the search that will be evaluated against each result in the result set to calculate the final weight of the result [1]. You can refer to the already calculated weight in the expression (which in this case would be the default BM25 weight) as well as any of the values matched along with that document.<br>
<br>In fact, this[2] is pretty much what we're looking for. In it I notice that you refer to "bias match" functionality and Rusty Conover's ExternalSourcePostList patch. Judging from past discussions [3] and svn [4] it appears that the bias match stuff was never really stable or something, so it was removed a while ago. Was ExternalSourcePostList meant to be dropped in as a replacement at some point in the future? I found two posts that Rusty made about it [5,6], but that's all -- have you heard from Rusty about it since? If so, how difficult would it be to integrate this with Xapian? (Unfortunately I am by no means a C++ expert -- it's been difficult enough just to stumble through the source code.)<br>
<br>Thanks for any insight you can give...<br><br>-- Elliot<br><br>[1] <a href="http://sphinxsearch.com/doc.html#sort-expr">http://sphinxsearch.com/doc.html#sort-expr</a><br>[2] <a href="http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.search.xapian.general/4075">http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.search.xapian.general/4075</a><br>
[3] <a href="http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.search.xapian.general/4774">http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.search.xapian.general/4774</a><br>[4] <a href="http://trac.xapian.org/changeset/8296">http://trac.xapian.org/changeset/8296</a><br>
[5] <a href="http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.search.xapian.devel/741">http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.search.xapian.devel/741</a><br>[6] <a href="http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.search.xapian.general/4061">http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.search.xapian.general/4061</a><br>
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