# Negative property boosting

**URL:** <https://forum.weaviate.io/t/negative-property-boosting/21902>\
**Category:** General\
**Tags:** developer-experience, feature-request\
**Created:** [August 26, 2025, 11:23am UTC](https://forum.weaviate.io/t/negative-property-boosting/21902 "2025-08-26T11:23:00Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![nikhil1728](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex027/user_avatar/forum.weaviate.io/nikhil1728/32/4246_2.png) [@nikhil1728](https://forum.weaviate.io/u/nikhil1728)\
**Post date:** [August 26, 2025, 11:23am UTC](https://forum.weaviate.io/t/negative-property-boosting/21902/1 "2025-08-26T11:23:00Z")

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Currently, Weaviate supports property boosting where certain fields can be given a higher weight during hybrid or BM25 searches. However, in some use cases, I want to do the opposite , **de-emphasize or negatively boost certain fields** so that they contribute _less_ to the final ranking.

**Questions:**

1. Is **negative property boosting** (or down-weighting) currently on the roadmap?

2. If not, is there any recommended **workaround** today (e.g., pre-processing, query composition, reranker logic, or custom scoring modules) to achieve this effect?

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**Author:** ![DudaNogueira](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex027/user_avatar/forum.weaviate.io/dudanogueira/32/7846_2.png) [@DudaNogueira](https://forum.weaviate.io/u/DudaNogueira)\
**Post date:** [August 26, 2025, 1:21pm UTC](https://forum.weaviate.io/t/negative-property-boosting/21902/2 "2025-08-26T13:21:35Z")

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hi @nikhil1728 !!

I believe you can achieve that by setting a high weight only for the ones you want to be positive.

So let’s say you have 4 properties, and want to negatively boost two of them, using [weighted query](https://docs.weaviate.io/weaviate/search/hybrid#set-weights-on-property-values):

query\_properties=[“negative1”, “negative2”, “positive1^10”, “positive2^10”]

I recall some discussion on improving this syntax, allowing for example [“\*”, “positive1^5”], meaning: query into all properties, but `positive1` is weighted at 5.

This because now, if you want to use the weighted feature, you need to explicitly add all properties that will be queried.

AFAIK, this is not in our roadmap. Please, feel free to add a [GH feature request](https://github.com/weaviate/weaviate/issues/new/choose), so we can track it and understand how popular with our community this feature is.

Thanks!

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**Author:** ![nikhil1728](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex027/user_avatar/forum.weaviate.io/nikhil1728/32/4246_2.png) [@nikhil1728](https://forum.weaviate.io/u/nikhil1728)\
**Post date:** [August 26, 2025, 1:43pm UTC](https://forum.weaviate.io/t/negative-property-boosting/21902/3 "2025-08-26T13:43:25Z")

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Thanks!!  
will try this workaround