Boosting

Boosting may be used to alter the relevancy value of a document compared to other documents in a search index, typically because it is perceived to be a more valuable resource. It is the addition or subtraction of a value to a document's rank (relevancy). By default, documents with the highest rank values are returned to the user before documents of lower rank values.

Boosting may be applied in two ways:

• Query independent (document boosting). This is used to boost high quality pages for all queries that match the document 
• Query dependant (query boosting). In this case specific documents may be boosted for given queries