Boost

The purpose of this widget is to give you an easy way to boost specific documents in the search results. For instance, if you are a retailer, you might want to boost products with a good margin. However, your boost options are restricted to the data available.

You can either boost documents based on specific field values, or just boost a specific document.

Search Handler

At the top of the widget you specify the search handler that will be used in the widget. The changes you make in this widget will be applied to the selected search handler.

Boost Fields

Underneath is an example from a book store where we have specified that we want to boost all books by the author “Allende” by adding “5” (additive boost) to the search score of the documents that contains the text “Allende” in the author-field.

The two search results in the example underneath are from before and after this boost rule was applied. As you can see, in the first search result list, a book by the author “Riordan” was at the top of the list. But after we added the new boost rule, four books by “Allende” climbed to the top of the list.

Before boost	After boost

When you add a new boost rule, remember to click the save icon at the right of the rule in order for the changes to take affect. If you want to delete a boost rule, you can do that by clicking the “x” next to the rule. The boost rule will be deleted immediately.

If you want, you can specify that the rule should only apply for a given period. You do that by selecting a start and end date for the rule.

Boosted Documents

If you have boosted specific documents, they will appear in this list.

If you want to boost a document, you can do that via the document widget for that particular document. Start by searching for the document you want to boost. The document widget opens when you click on the document in the search result list. Continue by clicking the boost-button in this widget and configure your boost rule.

After you have saved your new boost rule, it should appear in the section for boosted documents in the boost widget.

Prioritize Recent Documents

If your documents are dated by a field such as published_date, you can set up boosting that prioritizes new articles. The search score of an article is modified by a boost that is subject to half-life. At document age = 0, the boost is maximal, and at document age = half-life, the boost is half of that.