Solr search with ranking and best match - search

Question

i am new to this forum. I am looking for you suggestion on one of our searching requirement.
We have data of names , addresses and other relevant data to search for. The input for search going to be a free from text string with more than one word. The search api should match the input string against the complete data set includes names,address and other data. To fulfill the same , i have used copyField to copy all the required fields to a search field in solr confg. I am using the searchField as searchble agianst the input string that comes in. The input search string can have partial words like example below.
Name: Test Insurance company
Address: 123 Main Avenue, Galaxy city
Phone: [phone]
After solr creates the index, the searchable field will have the document like below
searchField {
Name: Test Insurance company
Address: 123 Main Avenue, Galaxy city
Phone: [phone]
}
End user can enter search string like "Test Company Main Ave" and the search is currently returns the above document. But not at the top, i see other documents are being returned too.
I am framing the solr query as ""Test* Company Main Ave" , adding a "*" after first word and going against the searchFiled
I have followed this approach after searching few forums over internet. How can i get the maximum match at the top. Not sure the above approach is right.
Any help appreciated.
Thanks,
Ram

Answer 1

You could index all fields separately and also use your searchField as a catchall.
Use an Edismax search handler to query all field with a scoring boost + also query your catchall field.
eg.
<str name="qf">
Name^2.0
Address^1.5
.
.
.
searchField^1.0
</str>
To boost relevancy, you could also index each field twice, once with a string type and then with a text_en type, as per this
<str name="qf">
Name^2.0
Name_exact^5.0
Address^1.5
Address_exact^3.0
.
.
.
searchField^1.0
</str>

Answer 2

Technically if there are documents above the one you want to match then they are a better match so it depends why they are getting a higher relevancy score. Try turning the debug on and see where the documents above your preferred document are getting the extra relevancy from.
Once you know why they are coming higher then you need to ask yourself why should your preferred document come first, what makes it a "better" match in your eyes.
Once you've decided why it should come top then you need to work out how to index and search the content so that the documents you expect to come first actually do come first, you may as qux says in his answer need to index multiple versions of the data to allow for better matching etc.
Si