[Xapian-discuss] word pair indexing and querying

[Chris Good]

Mark Hagger wrote:
> In fact the real problem is even harder than that, for various reasons its 
> convenient to not only match the query against one database, but to actually 
> try and match simultaneously against multiple disparate databases

To describe what is going on in a bit more detail, we are providing results to
another system that is, in effect, a meta search engine.  The end users will
be accessing the system on their mobile phones so there only a handful of results
can be displayed and these are shared amongst all of the contributing search systems. 

Each contributing search engine only gets to return a couple of results and the
meta-search engine picks the best X from those results.  In order to "play nice"
it is better to return nothing (and give the other seach systems a chance) than
to return matches that are dubious, hence our extreme prejudice against mediocre
matches.