[Xapian-devel] Sorting results by a "sort expression"

[Kevin Duraj]

Elliot,

You are welcome to work yourself on any features that Sphinx has and
Xapian don't. If that feature adds a value to Xapian and presere
performance, then I see no reason to not include in Xapian source
code.

Thanks,

Kevin Duraj
http://myhealthcare.com

On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 8:16 AM, Elliot Winkler <elliot.winkler at gmail.com> wrote:
> Olly,
>
> 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.
>
> 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.)
>
> Thanks for any insight you can give...
>
> -- Elliot
>
> [1] http://sphinxsearch.com/doc.html#sort-expr
> [2] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.search.xapian.general/4075
> [3] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.search.xapian.general/4774
> [4] http://trac.xapian.org/changeset/8296
> [5] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.search.xapian.devel/741
> [6] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.search.xapian.general/4061
>
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