SOLR boost query order is wrong

Question

I want to retrieve some documents from SOLR and pass boosts to the field's so that they are returned in the order I request them (respectively the web request requests them). Therefore I add boosts to the desired ids:

q=myfield:"9125129"^10 OR 
  myfield:"9125417"^9 OR 
  myfield:"9124611"^8 OR 
  myfield:"9126980"^7 ...
fl=myfield
wt=csv

Unfortunately, this does not return the documents in the desired order:

If I change the query to

q=myfield:"9125129"^9 OR 
  myfield:"9125417"^8 OR 
  myfield:"9124611"^7 OR 
  myfield:"9126980"^6 ...
fl=myfield
wt=csv

(just for testing), the correct order is returned:

So it seems like SOLR does not like the double-digit boost value? But according to the spec this shouldn't be a problem. So what is actually the problem here and how can i request boosted fields with more than 10 documents?

Used SOLR version: 4.10.4

Append debugQuery=true to your request - this will give you all the debug information necessary. When you're changing the boost values, it might just switch the position of the documents if score the score is non-constant - since you're using q, the score will be calculated for each document based on the queried term, and the scores may not be identical for each document (for example if they're spread out over several nodes, since each node may have a different number of docs). Appending debugQuery=true (debug=query or debug=all in newer versions of Solr) will show you the score calc — MatsLindh

luhu luhu · Accepted Answer · 2020-07-31T11:06:38

I found a documentation stating: "If absolute ordering is desired, a very high boost may be used." And indeed, if I assign very highly spread boost values (e.g. 1000, 900, 80, 7), the sort order is correct. But I guess it's open for discussion, whether this is a good practice and should be done like this. Seems a bit like guessing and using SOLR for something it was not designed for.

https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/solr/SolrRelevancyCookbook#SolrRelevancyCookbook-BoostingRankingTerms

SOLR boost query order is wrong

1 Answers