Scoring

You might come across scenarios where your search engine should be capable enough to search and display appropriate search results from a large collection of documents, especially when the visitor is not really sure of what he/she intends to search.

In this section, we will learn about the basic concepts of how Solr ranks the documents and later step into how we can tweak the way Solr ranks and renders the search results.

We must keep in mind that the score is not a term that holds an absolute value; instead, it holds a relative value with respect to the maximum score and is normalized to fall between 0 and 1.0. The primary objective behind implementing a score is to narrow down the field list to a smaller set by mapping the fields together and then inject the smaller set to the search engine. Doing so helps the search engine understand the request better and serve the requester in a more appropriate way.

To understand the preceding objective better, let us assume we have an event that...