The Query Elevation Component

The Query Elevation Component lets you configure the top results for a given query regardless of the normal Lucene scoring.

This is sometimes called "sponsored search," "editorial boosting," or "best bets." This component matches the user query text to a configured map of top results. The text can be any string or non-string IDs, as long as it’s indexed. Although this component will work with any QueryParser, it makes the most sense to use with DisMax or eDisMax.

The Query Elevation Component is supported by distributed searching.

All of the sample configuration and queries used in this section assume you are running Solr’s “techproducts” example:

bin/solr -e techproducts

Configuring the Query Elevation Component

You can configure the Query Elevation Component in the solrconfig.xml file. Search components like QueryElevationComponent may be added to any request handler; a dedicated request handler is used here for brevity.

<searchComponent name="elevator" class="solr.QueryElevationComponent" >
  <!-- pick a fieldType to analyze queries -->
  <str name="queryFieldType">string</str>
  <str name="config-file">elevate.xml</str>
</searchComponent>

<requestHandler name="/elevate" class="solr.SearchHandler" startup="lazy">
  <lst name="defaults">
    <str name="echoParams">explicit</str>
  </lst>
  <arr name="last-components">
    <str>elevator</str>
  </arr>
</requestHandler>

Optionally, in the Query Elevation Component configuration you can also specify the following to distinguish editorial results from "normal" results:

<str name="editorialMarkerFieldName">foo</str>

The Query Elevation Search Component takes the following arguments:

Argument Description

queryFieldType

Specifies which fieldType should be used to analyze the incoming text. For example, it may be appropriate to use a fieldType with a LowerCaseFilter.

config-file

Path to the file that defines query elevation. This file must exist in <instanceDir>/conf/<config-file> or <dataDir>/<config-file>. If the file exists in the /conf/ directory it will be loaded once at startup. If it exists in the data directory, it will be reloaded for each IndexReader.

forceElevation

By default, this component respects the requested sort parameter: if the request asks to sort by date, it will order the results by date. If forceElevation=true (the default), results will first return the boosted docs, then order by date.

elevate.xml

Elevated query results are configured in an external XML file specified in the config-file argument. An elevate.xml file might look like this:

<elevate>
  <query text="foo bar">
    <doc id="1" />
    <doc id="2" />
    <doc id="3" />
  </query>

  <query text="ipod">
    <doc id="MA147LL/A" />  <!-- put the actual ipod at the top -->
    <doc id="IW-02" exclude="true" /> <!-- exclude this cable -->
  </query>
</elevate>

In this example, the query "foo bar" would first return documents 1, 2 and 3, then whatever normally appears for the same query. For the query "ipod", it would first return "MA147LL/A", and would make sure that "IW-02" is not in the result set.

Using the Query Elevation Component

The enableElevation Parameter

For debugging it may be useful to see results with and without the elevated docs. To hide results, use enableElevation=false:

http://localhost:8983/solr/techproducts/elevate?q=ipod&df=text&debugQuery=true&enableElevation=true

http://localhost:8983/solr/techproducts/elevate?q=ipod&df=text&debugQuery=true&enableElevation=false

The forceElevation Parameter

You can force elevation during runtime by adding forceElevation=true to the query URL:

http://localhost:8983/solr/techproducts/elevate?q=ipod&df=text&debugQuery=true&enableElevation=true&forceElevation=true

The exclusive Parameter

You can force Solr to return only the results specified in the elevation file by adding exclusive=true to the URL:

http://localhost:8983/solr/techproducts/elevate?q=ipod&df=text&debugQuery=true&exclusive=true

Document Transformers and the markExcludes Parameter

The [elevated] Document Transformer can be used to annotate each document with information about whether or not it was elevated:

http://localhost:8983/solr/techproducts/elevate?q=ipod&df=text&fl=id,[elevated]

Likewise, it can be helpful when troubleshooting to see all matching documents – including documents that the elevation configuration would normally exclude. This is possible by using the markExcludes=true parameter, and then using the [excluded] transformer:

http://localhost:8983/solr/techproducts/elevate?q=ipod&df=text&markExcludes=true&fl=id,[elevated],[excluded]

The elevateIds and excludeIds Parameters

When the elevation component is in use, the pre-configured list of elevations for a query can be overridden at request time to use the unique keys specified in these request parameters.

For example, in the request below documents 3007WFP and 9885A004 will be elevated, and document IW-02 will be excluded — regardless of what elevations or exclusions are configured for the query "cable" in elevate.xml:

http://localhost:8983/solr/techproducts/elevate?q=cable&df=text&excludeIds=IW-02&elevateIds=3007WFP,9885A004

If either one of these parameters is specified at request time, the the entire elevation configuration for the query is ignored.

For example, in the request below documents IW-02 and F8V7067-APL-KIT will be elevated, and no documents will be excluded – regardless of what elevations or exclusions are configured for the query "ipod" in elevate.xml:

http://localhost:8983/solr/techproducts/elevate?q=ipod&df=text&elevateIds=IW-02,F8V7067-APL-KIT

The fq Parameter

Query elevation respects the standard filter query (fq) parameter. That is, if the query contains the fq parameter, all results will be within that filter even if elevate.xml adds other documents to the result set.