Searching with Solr, Sphinx or Lucene - ranking search results by clicks - search

Question

I want to implement a search that will rank results higher, if previous, similar searches have led users to click on a result.
Is that possible with either Solr (Lucene) or Sphinx?

Answer 1

I think, tracking of user clicks is necessary. (if the higher ranking depends on user clicks)
For "ranking higher" the results, maybe the solr-elevator function could be helpful for your needs: http://wiki.apache.org/solr/QueryElevationComponent
Probably the elevation-function is more helpful than the lucene boost function (in your case). http://lucene.apache.org/java/2_4_0/queryparsersyntax.html#Boosting%20a%20Term
Finlay it depends of the kind of implementation, i think.

Answer 2

It's certainly possible with Solr (Lucene), but not really feasible. What you'd have to do is:
Track the clicks of users
Normalize the search query to group similar queries and store them
Reindex that into Solr
If you ask me, that sounds like a lot of work with a lot of pitfalls.

Answer 3

With Sphinx you could use additional attribute clicks_count and use such query to rank clicked documents higher
SELECT *, clicks_count*1000 AS cc
FROM your_index
WHERE MATCH ("words to match") ORDER BY cc DESC;
to get only clicks wight into account
or
SELECT *, weght() + clicks_count*10000 AS cc
FROM your_index
WHERE MATCH ("words to match") ORDER BY cc DESC;
to get match weight with clicks weight into account
Of course you have update your counter 'clicks_count'.