Solr using document age combined with weighting factor to boost score?

Question

This is a bit of a weird one and I'm not sure solr can do it. I have a collection of document from differing sources some are time sensitive and some are evergreen. I'd lie to be able to give the user results that contain both. Right now I'm bosting the score of newer documents as describe here but that means the evergreen docs don't show up as much as I'd like.

I'd like to be able to include a factor in the boost that modifies it according to the class of document. In other words time sensitive docs would get one boost value based on age and evergreen ones would get a different boost or none at all.

Is there any way to tell solr not to apply the time boost to some docs?

Answer 1

Why don't you index evergreen document with index-time document-level boost? Then, if they match at all, they will have that boost combined with query time boost.

You can apply that boost in the update format (XML or JSON), DataImportHandler with $docBoost or in a RequestUpdateProcessor if there is a specific type to check that it is evergreen.