Split the attribute ranking rule into two sub-ranking rules: field and position.

[loiclec]

Following meilisearch/meilisearch#3222 , I think it would be a good idea to split the attribute ranking rule into two sub-ranking rules.

1. field would prioritise documents containing query words in important fields first
2. position would prioritise documents containing query words appearing at the beginning of the fields

Note that field interacts with the setting searchableAttributes and its functionality overlaps with another proposed ranking rule: words in [attribute set].

The names field and position probably aren't the best. Other suggestions were attribute:no-position and attribute:position.

Note that technically, within the search engine, these two ranking rules are already implemented but not exposed to the user. In fact, the current rule attribute corresponds to the rule field immediately followed by position.

[NicolasCharpentier]

Hi

I am in favor of this as we have in our index data like that

id: 1
field1: Mr. John Smith
field2: 2 street of the Burger king, New York

id: 2
field1: Mr. Smith the third
field2: 3 street of the Burger king, New York

id: 3
field1: Subscription n°2023-122 $200
field2: Paid by Mr. Smith

When querying for "Smith", we'd like

• the two first documents (id 1 and id 2) with the same score, as they both have "Smith" in their primary field
• the last document (id 3) with a lower score

So totally regardless of the position cos the position there really does not matter.

[NicolasCharpentier]

Looks like new 1.6 version with it's proximity customization could solve this, not sure tho as my problem was on "implicit" proximity rule applied when turning on the attributes rule. I'll check

[ManyTheFish]

Hello @NicolasCharpentier,
This will not change the behavior of the Attributes ranking rule, so no, this feature doesn't help.
However, the feature changes several things related to the proximity between words in the search engine, so changing this setting could make Meilisearch return the results in a better order from your point of view. 😄