3.8 (August 2 2012)

New Features

ENGINE-759 New Relevance Control over Geographic Searches

The engine now includes a new feature to improve the relevance (scores) of location searches by introducing isoRelevanceDistance to searches against geoloc type dimensions.

The new feature allows customers to give the same score to all matches found at a defined distance away from the target location. The result of this feature is that customers can more easily apply their own custom sorting rules to promote products or features within each region by applying a custom sortBy criterion. Previous to this feature, applying any sorting to the result set would negate any relevance due to location.

isoRelevanceDistance is defined as a list of distances, in miles or kilometers, for which the score should be constant.

For example, defining a isoRelevanceDistance [0.5, 5, 10, 20] (miles) would mean that the relevances of each item would be calculated by assuming a point at each isoRelevanceDistance and using that relevance for any points within the applicable relevance distance. Concretely, an item that is 7 miles away from the target would be assigned a relevance value as if it were just 5 miles away (the best score for that range). The relevance of anything in the first declared isoRelevanceDistance is 1.0.

isoRelevanceDistance has no impact on exact/fuzzy flags.

ENGINE-519 Fulltext Queries Support Quotes

The engine now supports using double quotes (”) in queries to support more control over matching and relevance.

When quotes are appear around one or more words in the query, the resulting items must match all and any words in quotes and the following analysis steps are not applied:

  • stemming
  • phonetic analysis
  • synonym reduction and expansion

When using double quotes around more than one word, the words must appear in the same order as entered and immediately proximate to each other.

For example the (unquoted) query university of miami would return both matches against university of miami or miami university, with higher relevance for the former and lower relevance for the latter. The (quoted) query university of miami would return only matches against university of miami.

ENGINE-767 CORS Support for queryable Web Service

The engine now supports a CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) web service for “queryable”. The new web service is available at /ws/queryable.

Improvements

ENGINE-779 Engine Query Testing Relaxes JSON Requirements

The Query tab of the engine’s admin tool has relaxed entry requirements while still validating the provided JSON. The improvements include:

  • Dictionary keys do not need to be quoted. For example, {foo: 1} will be accepted and converted to {"foo": 1}.
  • Graceful handling of extra commas. For example, {foo:1,bar:2,} will be converted to {"foo":1,"bar":2}.
  • Unicode whitespace characters are treated as and converted to their ASCII equivalents.

ENGINE-508 Text Highlighter Works Better for Phrases

The text highlighter now has improved support for highlighting phrases and quoted phrases.

ENGINE-780 Updated US Zip Code Database

The US Zip Code database has been updated to July 2012 US Postal Service specs.