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POSOLR/Lucene weighting by user-centric criteria
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copied!<p>We are switching from SQL Fulltext Search to Lucene (SOLR stack) search in the next few months. One last wrinkle in figuring out our strategy here has to with replicating one current part of our search platform.</p> <p>First, some nomenclature to describe the problem: Our site has a bunch of documents. People might "add" those documents, they might "favorite" those documents, they might "read" those documents, etc. Let's call that union of such documents for a given user their "personal documents". Some documents are public, and some are private so that only the logged-in-user can see them.</p> <p>Currently, we have a weighting function that will always show a given user's "personal" documents FIRST in the search list, for any search. This outranks the normal order (but a document must be valid in the result set -- it just ranks above any other less important document). In SQL, we are able to achieve this by having a user-defined-function that returns a score, and it varies by user. </p> <p>An analogy is Facebook -- where, when you type "Joe", it will first find all the Joes that you know, followed by any other Joe that meets the criteria. My search for "Joe" will return a different ordered set than your search for Joe.</p> <p>In the world of Lucene/SOLR, as I understand it, I cannot figure out how to have such user-centric weighting of documents without two separate queries that are then effectively UNIONed together (I know, it's not relational, but you get the idea). We have millions of users, and hundreds of thousands of documents. If a user is logged in, we want "their documents" to show up first in any search, then the rest of all documents. And in each case, we want the search results to show only those documents that match the original search -- we're just talking about rank-order.</p> <p>Can you think of any strategies here to reproduce this user-defined-function feature?</p>

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