Posted by kim markegard on June 24 2005 6:31pm [Delete] [Edit]
I'm not sure why MATCH/AGAINST uses a different scoring method when in boolean mode and when it's not. As stated above, if searching 3 terms in boolean mode, the score will be between 1 and 3 (integer). However, if not in boolean mode, the score is a floating point value.
It seems that non-boolean mode returns a "real" relevancy (based on how often each term was found I presume). In boolean mode it only returns how many terms were found. To me, this is not really relevancy. For instance, if searching on 2 terms, one result may have 20 occurrences of each term and another may have only 1 occurrence of each word, yet they will both return "2" as their relevance.