title: Solr: What are the benefits of length normalization/omitNorms=false?
body: <p>We're using Solr to search articles of various lengths.  We index both descriptive metadata (title, author, category, keywords, etc) and the full article text.  We do not boost relevance at index time - all boosts are done at query time (we use dismax, coupled with various qf, pf, and bf boosts).</p>
  
  <p>Currently our fulltext field uses the standard omitNorms=false; and as a result, all else equal, shorter articles (2-3 column inch articles) will frequently have higher relevance than longer feature-length (multi-page) articles.</p>
  
  <p>In our case article length is a significant indicator of relevance, and so I am considering setting omitNorms=true on our fulltext field.</p>
  
  <p>Questions:  1. Why is the default lucene/solr behavior to boost shorter field lengths over higher?  What is the reasoning?
  2. Why would I not want to omitNorms?  I don't need to boost queries on this particular field, nor use any kind of faceting on this field.</p>