[Xapian-devel] Custom weight factors - pushing the relevancy ranking how we want it

[Michiel Roding]

Hi guys (and gals?),

We're using Xapian/Omega for indexing and searching forums.

As forums are, the content that is relevant to a search is not just 
determined by the frequency or location of the terms; the date the topic 
has been last modified is important as well.
Another issue we find is that the amount of results is so overwhelming, 
the user is unable to find the correct topic for his needs. Combining 
this with some statistics, we found that a very large part of the 
queries to Omega are the same. Keywords like windows, xp, dvd etc. are 
very popular.
Therefore, we are contemplating to build a "does this topic meet your 
search?" feature to store which topics are most relevant to the queries 
as defined by the users.
Other features could be a lame attempt at the PageRank relevancy, 
storing if a user almost immediatly skips a topic (irrelevant) etc.

But, this needs to be stored (easy) and processed by Xapian in the sorting.

How could we go about this? Does Xapian somehow support these custom 
weight factors?

Michiel

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