Sitecore: Full text search using lucene - lucene

Question

I'm using sitecore 8 and I'm looking for a way to run a full text search for all my sitecore content. I have a solution in place, but I feel there's got to be a better way to do this.
My approach:
i have a computed field that merges all text fields into a single computed field. Before I execute a search I tokenize my search text and build a ORed predicate to match on the field.
I do not like this approach because it gets really complicated if I need to boost items that match the title vs the body i.e. i loose the field level boosting.
FYI: my code is very similar to this so post.
Thanks

Answer 1

Sitecore already maintains a full text field, _content, that contains all the text fields. You can run your search against that. You can even create computed fields that add to _content (such as the datasource content example here).
So assuming you are building a LINQ query for your full text search, and have already filtered on templates, latest version, location, etc., adding your search terms to the query would look something like this:
var terms = SearchTerm.Split();
var currentExpression = PredicateBuilder.True<SiteSearchResultItem>();
foreach (var term in terms)
{
//Content is mapped to _content
currentExpression = PredicateBuilder.And(currentExpression, x => x.Content.Contains(term));
}
query = query.Where(currentExpression);
Typically you would want to AND search terms rather than ORing them.
You are right that field level boosting is lost in this. In the end, Lucene is not a great solution for creating a quality full-text site search. If this is an important requirement, you may want to look at Coveo or even something like a Google Site Search.