CODEWITHSUNDEEP
postgresqlsolrfull-text-searchsphinx
AdamNYC
AdamNYC

Reputation: 20415

Text search with weights for individual keywords

I have a phrase to be matched against a text column. My phrase has multiple keywords, each associated with a given weight. For example,

Johnson [10] Software [5] Company [2]

I am using PostgreSQL full text search, and may use Thinking-Sphinx or Solr. Is there a function in these 3 options that allows me to search with different weights for each keyword?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 333

Answers (4)

Moosh
Moosh

Reputation: 396

Perhaps it's more easy to do it during indexation.

Indeed, you know words in your document, you can compute a "factor" during indexation

and so you can use rank_expr to influence ranking by this factor.

Upvotes: 0

yekta
yekta

Reputation: 3433

I think perhaps you might be trying to assign weight at the wrong point, hence the question?

Your question implies that you can (somehow) assign weight at a query level (which is impossible with Sphinx). I'm not familiar with Solr, but what happens in Solr when a query is "Software Company Johnson", and more importantly, how can you dynamically decide which is a name, which is a category and which is a type of category? Seems much more complicated to me.

Sphinx, which I can speak for, is very good at assigning a weight to various columns on a database, especially with Rails using ThinkingSphinx. More than likely you should have a name, category and type field with this scenario, if not I would suggest you have one. Then you could easily rank weight to name, type and category respectively. This should also be simple to accomplish in Solr.

Upvotes: 0

barryhunter
barryhunter

Reputation: 21091

Sphinx (and therefore Thinking-Sphinx) doesn't have a comparable feature.

But it can be emulated by various means, but to be clear, it can be tricky to setup. If this is the only reason to pick a product don't pick sphinx. But if you have other reasons to pick sphinx, then it could work out for you.

Upvotes: 1

Srikanth Venugopalan
Srikanth Venugopalan

Reputation: 9049

Solr allows you to do this.

Your query would look like this

q=(Johnson)^10 (Software)^5 (Company)^2

Note that the default operator (AND or OR) defined in your schema.xml comes into play here.

Upvotes: 1

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