A: 

I've never used ThinkingSphinx, but I boost query terms all of the time in Lucene/Solr. There should be a similar mechanism in most searching tools.

MattMcKnight
A: 

Sphinx 1.10 introduces new ranking mode: SPH_RANK_SPH04.

You can set ranking mode with thinking-sphinx although it is not documented on its home page. I can't recall right now how I did it exactly, but it was very similar to setting other search params.

skalee