Query Settings

The table below details the query settings for a project. The name, variable name, variable type, description, and default are defined for each setting.

Note: Your Watson Explorer Engine search application may or may not require the configuration of these parameters. If the description of the parameters listed here does not clearly identify its potential use in your search application, please contact IBM support for clarification.
Table 1. Query Settings
Setting Name Type Description

Default sources

(query.sources)

string

Space or comma separated list of source names to be queried if no sources have been specified. In the default setup this variable can be overwritten by the v:sources CGI parameter (see the Main XML).

Default: example-source-bundle

Pre-selected sources

(query.pre-selected-sources)

string

Space or comma separated list of source names which are always queried, independently of what sources have been selected or specified. This is particularly convenient for spelling correction and/or keymatch sources.

Number of results requested (total)

(query.num-total)

number

When specified, Watson Explorer Engine will try to adapt the number of results retrieved from each source to reach this number as a total. Overrides the number of results requested per source (query.num-per-source). The query.over-request variable, when specified, is used as a multiplier to take into account the eventual deduplications.

Default: 200

Number of results requested (per source)

(query.num-per-source)

number

The number of results requested for each source. query.num-total, when specified, takes precedence over this.

Default: 50

Over-request coefficient

(query.over-request)

number

When two or more sources are queried simultaneously and duplicates are removed, the total number of results may end up lower than expected. This parameter will multiply the total number of results requested to compensate for this loss.

Default: 1.3

Enable source aggregation

(query.aggregate)

boolean

When turned on, all sources queried are made to behave like a single source. This should be turned on when querying only search collections which are made to behave as if they were a single collection.

Default: false

Aggregate sources

(query.max-passes)

number

In combination with query.aggregate, this allows Watson Explorer Engine to go back that many times to a given source to get the right number of results. When querying multiple sources as one, Watson Explorer Engine can't know before seeing results, which of the sources has low/high score results and may need to go to some of them multiple times to fetch the top results across all sources.

Default: 3

Subsearch form

(query.subsearch-form)

string

The name of the form used to perform a subsearch ("find in clusters")

Default: subsearch

Enable Results Module Spotlights

(query.iopro-spotlights-enabled)

boolean

Whether or not to get spotlights for the user's query. These spotlights can be created using Results Module. If no value is specified for the Results Module Spotlight Collections setting below, all spotlight collections will be queried.

Default: false

Results Module Spotlight Collections

(query.iopro-spotlight-collections)

string

Space or comma separated list of Spotlight Collections as defined in Results Module. The list of possible values for this setting can be seen by going to Results Module and navigating to the Spotlight Manager > Collections page and looking at the Watson Explorer Engine ID column.