OrderBy does not order correctly - solr

I have the following query
var predicate = PredicateBuilder.True<SearchModel>();
predicate = predicate.And(x => (templateIDs.Contains(x.TemplateId))); // To match certain templates only
var products = searchContext.GetQueryable()
.Where(predicate)
.OrderBy(i => i.Title) //will order the items by display
.Take(pageSize); //pageSize is passed through and is an integer
.GetResults();
I never get the results ordered alphabetically.
If I do the following however, the results are ordered correctly.
var fullResults = searchResults.ToList().OrderBy(x=>x.Title).Take(pageSize); //pageSize is passed through and is an integer
Does anyone know why?
And If I do it the second way (.ToList().OrderBy().Take().), would it have any performance implications, as I believe the results will be ordered and paged after the results are fetched from Solr?

Sorting in Solr can be a bit confusing. Historically, there has also been some issues around sorting in the ContentSearch provider for Solr, where orderby clauses has been inversed etc. Assuming you're on a fairly recent Sitecore version, these issues has been fixed as far as I know. In order to pinpoint where your problem is, you should look in the search.log and verify that the predicate builder/content search actually performs the query you expect.
Given that the above is ok, you're probably facing a common misunderstanding on how Solr works. I'd guess your Title field is indexed as a "text" field, such as title_t_en, and not a string field. Text fields are tokenized and stemmed before being stored in Solr. Sorting will therefore be performed on the tokenized terms instead of the whole string. This means a text, such as "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog", will be stemmed to something like ["quick", "brown", "fox", "jump", "over", "lazy", "dog"] and an order by statement will sort it on "brown". This may cause the sorting to look very wrong, as the result may not be sorted on the first word in the string.
One way of solving this is to save a copy of your Title field into a title_s field. You can either do this with a copy statement in the solr schema or if you want to keep the schema untouched, you can make a computed field mapped as a string. Thereby you can perform a lingual text query on the stemmed text field and order the result on the string field.

Related

Solr OR query on a text field

How to perform a simple query on a text field with an OR condition? Something like name:ABC OR name:XYZ so the resulting set would contain only those docs where name is exactly "XYZ" or "ABC"
Dug tons of manuals, cannot figure this out.
I use Solr 5.5.0
Update: Upgraded to Solr 6.6.0, still cannot figure it out. Below are illustrations to demonstrate my issue:
This works:
This works too:
This still works:
But this does not! Omg why!?
There are many ways to perform OR query. Below I have listed some of them. You can select any of it.
[Simple Query]
q=name:(XYZ OR ABC)
[Lucene Query Parser]
q={!lucene q.op=OR df=name v="XYZ ABC"}
Your syntax is right, but what you're asking for isn't what text fields are made for. A text field is tokenized (split into multiple tokens), and each token is searched by itself. So if the text inserted is "ABC DEF GHI", it will be split into three separate tokens, namely "ABC", "DEF" and "GHI". So when you're searching field:ABC, you're really asking for any document that has the token "ABC" somewhere.
Since you want to perform an exact match, you want to query against a field that is defined as a string field, as this will keep the value verbatim (including casing, so the matching will be case sensitive). You can tell Solr to index the same content into multiple fields by adding a copyFile instruction, telling it to take the content submitted for field foo and also copying it into field bar, allowing you to perform both an exact match if needed and a more general search if necessary.
If you need to perform exact, but case insensitive, searches, you can use a KeywordTokenizer - the KeywordTokenizer does nothing, keeping the whole string as a single token, before allowing you to add filters to the analysis chain. By adding a LowercaseFilter you tell Solr to lowercase the string as well before storing it (or querying for it).
You can use the "Analysis" page under the Solr admin page to experiment and see how content for your field is being processed for each step.
After that querying as string_field:ABC OR string_field:XYZ should do what you want (or string_field:(ABC OR XYZ) or a few other ways to express the same.
A wacky workaround I've just come up with:

Solr negative boost

I'm looking into the possibility of de-boosting a set of documents during
query time. In my application, when I search for e.g. "preferences", I want
to de-boost content tagged with ContentGroup:"Developer" or in other words,
push those content back in the order. Here's the catch. I've the following
weights on query fields and boost query on source
qf=text^6 title^15 IndexTerm^8
As you can see, title has a higher weight.
Now, a bunch of content tagged with ContentGroup:"Developer" consists of a
title like "Preferences.material" or "Preferences Property" or
"Preferences.graphics". The boost on title pushes these documents at the
top.
What I'm looking is to see if there's a way to deboost all documents that are
tagged with ContentGroup:"Developer" irrespective of the term occurrence is
text or title. I tried something like, but didn't make any difference.
Source:simplecontent^10 Source:Help^20 (-ContentGroup-local:("Developer"))^99
I'm using edismax query parser.
Any pointers will be appreciated.
Thanks,
Shamik
You're onto something with your last attempt, but you have to start with *:*, so that you actually have something to subtract the documents from. The resulting set of documents (those not matching your query) can then be boosted.
From the Solr Relevancy FAQ
How do I give a negative (or very low) boost to documents that match a query?
True negative boosts are not supported, but you can use a very "low" numeric boost value on query clauses. In general the problem that confuses people is that a "low" boost is still a boost, it can only improve the score of documents that match. For example, if you want to find all docs matching "foo" or "bar" but penalize the scores of documents matching "xxx" you might be tempted to try...
q = foo^100 bar^100 xxx^0.00001 # NOT WHAT YOU WANT
...but this will still help a document matching all three clauses score higher then a document matching only the first two. One way to fake a "negative boost" is to give a large boost to everything that does not match. For example...
q = foo^100 bar^100 (*:* -xxx)^999
NOTE: When using (e)dismax, people sometimes expect that specifying a pure negative query with a large boost in the "bq" param will work (since Solr automatically makes top level purely negative positive queries by adding an implicit ":" -- but this doesn't work with "bq", because of how queries specified via "bq" are added directly to the main query. You need to be explicit...
?defType=dismax&q=foo bar&bq=(*:* -xxx)^999

Haystack/Solr boosting results if the query is found in a specific field

We're having issues with non relevant results being returned as the highest results in our search and we're trying to improve that behavior, but not really sure how.
We have SearchIndex with about a dozen fields. The document=True field is a template backed field that we have placed the majority of the content into. Some of the stuff found in there is much less relevant than other stuff, even if it's still useful.
To give a concrete example: if a user searches for "red rose", we want to return red roses as the top results...even better if lower results are just roses or just red, or even are described as being "rose red" in color.
The issue is our document=True field has a ton of items that are described as being "rose red". Worse the actual red roses don't have "red" and "rose" particularly close to each other as those values would come from disparate fields. As a result we get the top few hundred results that are completely irrelevant.
What we would like to do is either:
A. Search the primary document and then search each of our other fields and boost (but not hard filter) accordingly. If the term "rose" appears in one of the items names and "red" appears as one of it's attribute values than that result should have a higher score. This gives us the optimal results in theory sorted by relevancy.
B. Search all fields at once and boost if the value is any of the "boosted" fields.
It seems like using field boost should be the answer, but we can't figure out how to express it since filtering based on a field is a harsh exclude and we want it to only impact the relevance scoring.
The result of both of these is effectively the same. We just can't figure out how to do either of them with Haystack. Or if we'd have to fall back to raw queries how to write a solr query that accomplishes this.
I can give you some pointers, as I did not get the exact use case :-
You can check on Solr edismax query parser to configure:-
Fields you want to search on - Mainly to select the results
Variable boost on fields for relevancy - To determine the importance on fields
Variable boost for different words combination e.g. single words, phrase match, shingle match with slop to determine relevancy
Provide additional boost on other fields
This will help you to filter the results and order them accordingly as per the field and word combination matches

SOLR index time boost depending on the field value

Is it possible to boost a document on the indexing stage depending on the field value?
I'm indexing a text field pulled from the database. I would like to boost results that are shorter over the longer ones. So the value of boost should depend on the length of the text field.
This is needed to alter the standard SOLR behavior that in my case tends to return documents with multiple matches first.
Considering I have a field that stores the length of the document, the equivalent in the query of what I need at indexing would be:
q={!boost b=sqrt(length)}text:abcd
Example:
I have two items in the DB:
ABCDEBCE
ABCD
I always want to get ABCD first for the 'BC' query even though the other item contains the search query twice.
The other solution to the problem would be ability to 'switch off' the feature that scores multiple matches higher at query time. Don't know if that is possible either...
Doing this at index time is important as the hardware I run the SOLR on is not too powerful and trying to boost on query time returns with OutOfMemory Exception. (Even If I could work around that increasing memory for java I prefer to be on the safe side and implement the index the most efficient way possible.)
Yes and no - but how you do it depends on how you're indexing your documents.
As far as I know there's no way of resolving this only on the solr server side at the moment.
If you're using the regular XML based interface to submit documents, let the code that generates the submitted XML add boost=".." values to the field or to the document depending on the length of the text field.
You can check upon DIH Special Commands which has a $docBoost command
$docBoost : Boost the current doc. The value can be a number or the
toString of a number
However, there seems no $fieldBoost Command.
For you case though, if you are using DefaultSimilarity, shorter fields are boosted higher then longer fields in the Score calculation.
You can surely implement your own Simiarity class with a changed TF (Term Frequency) and LengthNorm Calculation as your needs.

Different indexing and search strategies on same field without doubling index size?

For a phrase search, we want to bring up results only if there's an exact match (without ignoring stopwords). If it's a non-phrase search, we are fine displaying results even if the root form of the word matches etc.
We currently pass our data through standardTokenizer, StopFilter, PorterStemFilter and LowerCaseFilter. Due to this when user wants to search for "password management", search brings up results containing "password manager".
If I remove StemFilter, then I will not be able to match for the root form of the word for non-phrase queries. I was thinking if I should index the same data as part of two fields in document.
For the first field (to be used for phrase searches), following tokenizers/filters will be used:
StandardTokenizer, LowerCaseFilter
For the second field (Non-phrase searches)
StandardTokenizer, StopFilter, PorterStemFilter, LowerCaseFilter
Now, based on whether it's a phrase search or not, I need to rewrite user's query to search in the appropriate field.
Is this the right way to address this issue? Is there any other way to achieve this without doubling index size?
let's say user's query is
summary:"Furthermore, we should also fix this"
Internally this will be translated to
summary_field1:"Furthermore, we should also fix this"
If user's query is
summary:(Furthermore, we should also fix this)
Internally this will be translated to
+summary_field2:furthermor +summary_field2:we +summary_field2:should +summary_field2:also +summary_field2:fix
both summary_field1 and summary_field2 index the same data. summary_field1 passes through only StandardTokenizer and LowerCaseFilter, whereas summary_field2 passes through StandardTokenizer, StopFilter, PorterStemFilter and LowerCaseFilter.
Please let me know if I'm missing something here.
By defining two different fields you can search for exact matches.
By using boosts you can also bring results in one query. For example:
(firstField:"password management")^5 OR (secondField:"pasword management")^1

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