Useful Relevance with FullText Boolean Mode - help

[leegold]

Show full header Is there any way to make relevance when using boolean
mode more useful? If not, are there plans in the Fulltext development
"todo" for making it useful?

I'm thinking of just counting the keyword occurences in records with a
PHP script somehow and using that to order the records somehow. Or doing
a non boolean fulltext search w/relevance first and then melding that in
somehow with a boolean search.

See my results below, my "peeps" are asking me for relevance/ranking -
what do I do?
Thanks.

mysql> SELECT `page`.`title` , MATCH ( `title` , `descrip` ) AGAINST (
'nasdac' IN BOOLEAN MODE ) AS Relevance FROM `page` WHERE MATCH (
`title` , `descrip` ) AGAINST ( 'nasdac' IN BOOLEAN MODE )HAVING
Relevance > 0.2 ORDER BY Relevance DESC;
+------------------------------------------------+-----------+
| title | Relevance |
+------------------------------------------------+-----------+
| Code 30 Specifications | 1 |
| Center for Aero Information (CAI) | 1 |
| nasdac Centers | 1 |
| nasdac Electronic Parts & Packaging Program | 1 |
| Report/Document Number Series | 1 |
| misskermit | 1 |
| COSMIC | 1 |
| Consolidated Operations Contract (COC) | 1 |
| Directives | 1 |
| Directory of Project Libraries | 1 |
| nasdac Technical Standards Program | 1 |
| Outstocking Handbook | 1 |
| nasdac Database (NAD) | 1 |
| nasdac test | 1 |
+------------------------------------------------+-----------+
14 rows in set (0.01 sec)

[Bill Karwin]

leegold wrote:

See my results below, my "peeps" are asking me for relevance/ranking -
what do I do?

You could fetch a field as a non-boolean MATCH result, and use that for
your ordering, even if your WHERE clause limits the rows by a boolean
MATCH result.

SELECT `page`.`title`,
MATCH(`title` , `descrip`) AGAINST ('nasdac' IN BOOLEAN MODE)
AS Relevance,
MATCH(`title` , `descrip`) AGAINST ('nasdac')
AS NonBoolRelevance
FROM `page`
WHERE MATCH(`title` , `descrip` ) AGAINST ('nasdac' IN BOOLEAN MODE)
HAVING Relevance > 0.2
ORDER BY NonBoolRelevance DESC;

As for improvements to full-text searching on the horizon, I don't know
of anything, but you can keep an eye on this page and its sub-pages:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/todo.html

Regards,
Bill K.