<p>In Lucene if you had multiple indexes that covered only one partition each. Why does the same search on different indexes return results with different scores? The results from different servers match exactly. </p>

<p>i.e. if I searched for :</p>

<ul>
<li>Name - John Smith</li>
<li>DOB - 11/11/1934</li>
</ul>

<p><strong>Partition 0</strong> would return a score of 0.345</p>

<p><strong>Partition 1</strong> would return a score of 0.337</p>

<p>Both match exactly on name and DOB.</p>

The
scoring
contains the Inverse Document Frequency(IDF). If the term "John Smith" is in one partition, 0, 100 times and in partition 1, once. The score for searching for John Smith would be higher search in partition 1 as the term is more scarce.
To get round this you would wither have to have your index being over all partitions, or you would need to override the IDF.