[Xapian-discuss] Making SORTAFTER useful in omega?

[Arjen van der Meijden]

Hello List,

Our users keep asking for some more "logical" sorting of search results. 
Now the results are sorted on relevance, i.e. the raw weight, by 
default. But since the users only see the percentage, that results in a 
seemingly random secondary sorting.

According to the docs and earlier mails, omega has the 'SORTAFTER' (and 
docid sorting) functionality to allow date-based secondary sorting. But 
according to later mails and the documentation that's only useful if you 
don't use the default BM25-weighting. Unfortunately you can't alter the 
weighting scheme via Omega-calls.
Nor does it seem to help to simply patch query.cc to use TradWeight 
rather than BM25.

Since we've built our set-up around omega, we'd rather not have to build 
something similar or patch omega just because its missing a small but 
important feature. Is it somehow possible to make the newer results in 
the seemingly similarly relevant results sort on top within Omega?

Best regards,

Arjen