[Xapian-discuss] boost in QueryParser

[Olly Betts]

On Fri, Oct 17, 2014 at 02:50:23PM -0700, Mir Siadaty wrote:
> Searching xapian-discuss for 'boost';
> I see the response “Date: 2010-04-04 06:49:08 GMT”;
> Which says “There's no syntax for this in the QueryParser currently
> though”;
> Question: is it still (201410) true that QueryParser can not take
> boost for query terms?

I think so.

> Assuming answer to above Q is yes; then one solution is to repeat the
> term (ORing) to make it influence the relevance score more.
> Q2: how badly above solution deteriorates IR performance?

I don't think it's possible to give a general answer to that - you'll
probably need to try it in your particular situation and measure the
retrieval effectiveness.

Or by "performance" do you mean how fast queries are executed?  I'd
expect some queries to be faster and some slower than they would be
without repeating a query term.

> Q3: would you please suggest alternative solutions?

You can build your own Query objects instead of using
Xapian::QueryParser - then you have full control over them.

Cheers,
    Olly