DisMax and eDisMax query modes

DisMax (Disjunction Max)and eDisMax (Extended Disjunction Max) are query modes in Solr. They define the way how Solr parses user input to query different fields and with different relevance weights. eDisMax is an improvement over the DisMax query mode. DisMax and eDisMax are by default enabled in our Solr configuration. To switch the query type we need to specify defType=dismax or defType=edismax in our Solr query.

Let us add some more books to our index. Execute the following command in our <solr dir>/example/exampledocs folder (books.csv is available in code downloads):

java -Durl=http://localhost:8080/solr/update -Dtype=application/csv -jar post.jar books.csv

DisMax handles most queries. But there are still some cases where DisMax is unable to provide results. It is advisable to use eDisMax in those cases. The DisMax query parser does not support the default Lucene query syntax. But that syntax is supported in eDisMax. Let us check it out.

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