elasticsearchlucenecouchbasetf-idfrelevance

How does calculating relevance scoring in Elasticsearch differ from Couchbase?


I wonder whether relevance score in elasticsearch has differences with couchbase or not?


Solution

  • As per this 2019 couchbase thread, it looks like they are still using the tf/idf for scoring, while Elasticsearch used to have the same algorithm but now moved to BM25 algorithm for score calculation from 5.0.

    Note: TF/IDF is a very popular algorism for calculating the relevance score and based on term frequency and inverse document frequency, while BM25 is the latest and improvised form based on probabilistic scoring more details about them can be found here and here.

    Note: As in the question, it's not mentioned for what purpose you are comparing both the relevance of the system, My two cents are if you are building a full-blown search system and relevance matters for you, then you should choose Elasticseaech whose primary function is to search and has a lot of flexibility in choosing different algorithm and different ways to define the scoring mechanism, which is not present in NoSQL solution like Couchbase.