Lucene exact ordering

Question

I\'ve had this long term issue in not quite understanding how to implement a decent Lucene sort or ranking. Say I have a list of cities and their populations. If someone se

Answer 1

My current solution is to create an exact searcher and a prefix searcher, both sorted by reverse population, and then copy out all my hits starting from the exact hits, moving to the prefix hits. It makes paging my results slightly more annoying than I think it should be.

Also I used a hash to eliminate duplicates but later changed the prefix searcher into a boolean query of a prefix search (MUST) with an exact search (MUST NOT), to have Lucene remove the duplicates. Though this seemed even more wasteful.

Edit: Moved to a comment (since the feature now exists): Yuval F Thank you for your blog post ... How would the sort comparator know that the name field "london" exactly matches the search term "london" if it cannot access the search term?