MySQL match() against() - order by relevance and column?

Solution 1:

This might give the increased relevance to the head part that you want. It won't double it, but it might possibly good enough for your sake:

SELECT pages.*,
       MATCH (head, body) AGAINST ('some words') AS relevance,
       MATCH (head) AGAINST ('some words') AS title_relevance
FROM pages
WHERE MATCH (head, body) AGAINST ('some words')
ORDER BY title_relevance DESC, relevance DESC

-- alternatively:
ORDER BY title_relevance + relevance DESC

An alternative that you also want to investigate, if you've the flexibility to switch DB engine, is Postgres. It allows to set the weight of operators and to play around with the ranking.

Solution 2:

Just adding for who might need.. Don't forget to alter the table!

ALTER TABLE table_name ADD FULLTEXT(column_name);

Solution 3:

I have never done so, but it seems like

MATCH (head, head, body) AGAINST ('some words' IN BOOLEAN MODE)

Should give a double weight to matches found in the head.

Just read this comment on the docs page, Thought it might be of value to you:

Posted by Patrick O'Lone on December 9 2002 6:51am

It should be noted in the documentation that IN BOOLEAN MODE will almost always return a relevance of 1.0. In order to get a relevance that is meaningful, you'll need to:

SELECT MATCH('Content') AGAINST ('keyword1 keyword2') as Relevance 
FROM table 
WHERE MATCH ('Content') AGAINST('+keyword1+keyword2' IN BOOLEAN MODE) 
HAVING Relevance > 0.2 
ORDER BY Relevance DESC 

Notice that you are doing a regular relevance query to obtain relevance factors combined with a WHERE clause that uses BOOLEAN MODE. The BOOLEAN MODE gives you the subset that fulfills the requirements of the BOOLEAN search, the relevance query fulfills the relevance factor, and the HAVING clause (in this case) ensures that the document is relevant to the search (i.e. documents that score less than 0.2 are considered irrelevant). This also allows you to order by relevance.

This may or may not be a bug in the way that IN BOOLEAN MODE operates, although the comments I've read on the mailing list suggest that IN BOOLEAN MODE's relevance ranking is not very complicated, thus lending itself poorly for actually providing relevant documents. BTW - I didn't notice a performance loss for doing this, since it appears MySQL only performs the FULLTEXT search once, even though the two MATCH clauses are different. Use EXPLAIN to prove this.

So it would seem you may not need to worry about calling the fulltext search twice, though you still should "use EXPLAIN to prove this"