[Xapian-discuss] Change document relevance on user feedback

[Olly Betts]

On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 04:55:51PM +0100, Benjamin Hille wrote:
> I cannot find anywhere in API if it is possible to store back the relevance
> into the database. It looks like RSet does not write back into the db when
> you add a document to it. What really I need is once a user A as choosen the
> document as relevant for a query the same query by user B should have the
> document choosen by A as relevant.

Note that it may not be true that a document which is relevant to a
query for user A is also relevant to the exact same query for user B.

Disambiguation pages on wikipedia nicely illustrate one reason for this
- a word or phrase can have multiple meanings, and different users may
be looking for different meanings which have the same expression.  For
example, a query for "stock" could mean many things:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_(disambiguation)

Even if users are actually expressing the same meaning, they may not
like the same pages.  A Java guru might search for a standard class name
to check some obscure detail and want reference material; a Java novice
might search for the same class, but want tutorials.

Cheers,
    Olly