How to boost Solr relevancy score by inverse of geodist()

Question

So I've implemented and successfully used Solr 4. I've got to say that Solr 4 is awesome! Anyway I successfully sorted by distance and used a geofilter to limit the results to a certain area. What I would like to do now is boost the relevancy score by the inverse of the distance. This page talks about it but doesn't say how to do it (http://wiki.apache.org/solr/SpatialSearch)

I've tried the following but it gives me an error:

http://localhost:8983/solr/select/?q={!boost b=recip(geodist(), 1, 1000, 1000)}...

The error I get is:

org.apache.lucene.queryParser.ParseException: Expected identifier at pos 27 str='{!boost b=recip(geodist(), 1, 10 in ...

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

You still need to specify the main part of your query after the boost function:

q={!boost b=recip(geodist(),1,1000,1000)}foo:bar&...

If you're only interested in boosting by the inverse of the distance you can use a wildcard query:

q={!boost b=recip(geodist(),1,1000,1000)}*&...

...or use the function query parser:

q={!func}recip(geodist(),1,1000,1000)&...

You also need to specify the lat/long values and spatial field to query against either as arguments of the geodist function:

q={!boost b=recip(geodist(50.1, -0.86, myGeoField),1,1000,1000)}foo:bar&...

...or factored out as query string parameters:

q={!boost b=recip(geodist(),1,1000,1000)}foo:bar&sfield=myGeoField&pt=50.1,-0.86