Definition of Score in Search results

Search results for an artist shows a “score” in the first column. Is there some information somewhere about how this is calculated?

Searching for “Bob Marley” results in Bob Marley the comedian getting a score of 100 whereas the much more well known Bob Marley the Jamaican reggae artist gets a score of 99. Not very different, I agree, but I am writing an app that makes use of the score and it would help to know how it is calculated so that I interpret the data in an appropriate way.

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IIRC it’s the way it comes from Lucene - if that’s the case, their docs on scoring might be useful.

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The search server doesn’t know how well-known or popular an artist is, so it can’t include that in the score.

Thanks for the link. I’ve just had a quick look : clearly a major subject in its own right :slight_smile: I suspect that to get a fuller idea of what happens, I would need to know at least a little bit about how the Lucene queries are constructed by the search engine. But I need to spend a bit more time studying the docs first …

Of course, that must be true.
It was more that I was wondering what the impact might be between looking for a score of exactly 100, or perhaps using some lower threshold such as 90. The problem is not so much getting multiple hits - I get that in some cases even with a score of 100 - it is that if there is only one hit of exactly 100 and it turns out to be not the one I want, I’m looking for something that would allow me to flag a warning. But, as I said in my reply to reosarevok, I need to study the lucene docs as there might be some approach I could take.

That’s not entirely true. The scores are always changed by the search server such that the top result has a score of 100 (click and (for example) click).