Text score and synonym support

You can use synonyms to improve the results for a query. You can use a text score to find out how closely a result matches the query.

Text score

A text score is calculated as part of the search, and can be included in the query results. A text score is a value 0 - 1, up to three decimal points; for example, 0.000 to 1.000. A text score denotes how closely a result matches the query relative to all the other documents in the text search index.

OMNIFIND composes the text score from various factors, such as the general importance of the search terms and the proximity of occurrences of the search terms. The general importance is based on the frequency of the terms in each document and offset by the frequency of the terms across all documents.

Synonym support

The OmniFind Text Search Server for DB2® for i supports the use of synonyms to modify the results of a query. Using synonyms can increase the number of query results by causing more documents to match a query. However, using synonyms might also decrease the precision of a query and make it more difficult to find few documents that match the exact search criteria.

By default, synonyms are not used for a query. To use synonyms for a query, create a synonym dictionary, and add the synonym dictionary to a collection by using the synonym tool.

For more information about synonyms, see Synonym dictionaries.