Bug #2016 Suggestion for more meaningful "Relevance" in fulltext searching
Submitted: 4 Dec 2003 11:54 Modified: 7 Dec 2003 14:53
Reporter: Philip Mak Email Updates:
Status: Won't fix Impact on me:
None 
Category:MySQL Server Severity:S4 (Feature request)
Version: OS:
Assigned to: Sergei Golubchik CPU Architecture:Any

[4 Dec 2003 11:54] Philip Mak 
Description:
When all of the words in the query have + before them, it seems the relevance is just 1 for any matching rows, and 0 for everything else.

In this case, I think it would be nice if the relevance score could be more meaningful. For example, if the words appear more often, the relevance could be made higher.

How to repeat:
This is a feature request.
[7 Dec 2003 14:53] Sergei Golubchik 
Strictly speaking, the search in boolean mode cannot return any "relevance" at all - as the search is boolean the result is always TRUE/FALSE, one boolean expression cannot be "more true" than  another one.

Still, there is some simple relevance-like value computed to let users somehow rank matched documents. As this is an extension of boolean model already, and there can be no perfectly logical "relevance" here anyway, I do not feel like spending a lot of time on this issue.

But if you propose a better formula for the "relevance" in boolean mode, I will consider putting it in.