Presenting the Hitlist

After executing the query, query applications typically present a hitlist of all documents that satisfy the query along with a relevance score. This list can be a list of document titles or URLs depending on your document set.

Your application presents a hitlist in one or more of the following ways:

• show documents ordered by score

• show structured fields related to document, such as title or author

• show document hit count

Hitlist Example

Figure 1-4 is a screen shot of a query application presenting the hitlist to the user.

Figure 1-4 Query Application Presenting Hitlist

Text description of the illustration fig3.gif

Presenting Structured Fields

Structured columns related to the text column can help identify documents. When you present the hitlist, you can show related columns such as document titles or author or any other combination of fields that identify the document.

You specify the name of structured column or columns in the SELECT statement.

Ordering the Hitlist

When you issue either a text query or theme query, Oracle returns the hitlist of documents that satisfy the query with a relevance score for each document returned. You can use these scores to order the hitlist to show the most relevant documents first.

The score for each document is between one and one hundred. The higher the score, the more relevant the document.

Oracle calculates scores when you use the CONTAINS and CATSEARCH operator. You obtain scores using the SCORE operator.

See Also: Chapter 3, "Querying"

Presenting Document Hit Count

You present the number of hits the query returned alongside the hitlist, using SELECT COUNT(*). For example:

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM docs WHERE CONTAINS(text, 'oracle', 1) > 0;

To count hits in PL/SQL, you can also use the CTX_QUERY.COUNT_HITS procedure.