toastdriven/django-haystack — Issue #508: Term Boost making documents disappear (using Whoosh)
Author: orblivion
Created: 2012-02-13 22:04:47+00:00
State: open

I'm trying to use Boost to eliminate the use of words like 'a' and 'the' in our documents, and to reduce the relevance of interrogative words. However as I add more words, it seems to eliminate documents from the results.

return ( sqs
.boost('a', 0)
.boost('the', 0)
.boost('is', 0.3)
.boost('who', 0.8)
.boost('what', 0.8)
.boost('where', 0.8)
.boost('when', 0.8)
.boost('why', 0.8)
.boost('how', 0.8)
)

Even if I only have the last four items, and boost them to 1.8, there are no documents returned (in my particular document set), even if none of the terms are in the search query.

If I am misunderstanding how Term Boost works, I would suggest clarifying that in the documentation.

Thanks.