How to control the order of Search Results

[Kanwal Gupta <kg...@sapient.com>]

Hi
 
I am using Lucene for the MIT's Open Courseware website as a part of
enhancement we need to have better control over the order of search
results. Currently, for a webpage indexing is done for metadata like
Title, Description, Resource, Author, Keyword etc. and the HTML content
itself.
 
Order by relevance functionality provided by Lucene assigns better rank
to metadata than the HTML content (due to score normalization), but, the
requirement is to control the order of results within different metadata
fields.
 
Example: 
Title should get more weight that Author irrespective of the number of
words in the field
Description should get more weight than Resource even though the
description always has more words than the Resource metadata
 
Question: 
Is there an easy way to multiply the score with some Multiplication
Factor" at the time of generating indexes?
Can the Boost Factor be applied to pump-up the relevance of one
Name:Value pair as against another Name:Value pair? How effective is
this boosting? Does the score/relevance get multiplied by the Boost
factor?
 
Thanks
 
Kanwal