In this chapter, we covered the most advanced topics the book has to offer—scoring and function queries. We began with a fundamental background on Lucene scoring. Next, we saw a real-world example of using the debugQuery parameter to diagnose a scoring issue. That exercise might be the most important exercise in the chapter, since it gives you the tools to diagnose why a document matched or didn't match a query. Next, we concluded the coverage of the DisMax query parser. Even if you aren't inclined to use fancy boosting function queries, you can improve your search relevancy simply by configuring phrase boosting. The DisMax query parsers's boost function parameters were segue to the second half of the chapter: function queries. Even if you aren't a math whiz, you should be able to use formulas provided here, especially if you worked through the how-tos.

You might say this is the last of the foundational chapters. The next two chapters cover specific search-value adds that are each...