diff --git a/AUTHORS b/AUTHORS
index 4c07544..75481f0 100644
--- a/AUTHORS
+++ b/AUTHORS
@@ -23,4 +23,4 @@ Thanks to:
     * Sym Roe for a patch that improved performance in "more-like-this" and suggestion the removal of FLAG_PARTIAL.
     * liranz for pointing out a potential conflict with arguments pass into `SearchResult`
     * Jacob Kaplan-Moss for pointing out that write permission shouldn't be required for searching.
-    * glassresistor for assistance troubleshooting an issue with boosting a phrase query.
\ No newline at end of file
+    * glassresistor for assistance troubleshooting an issue with boosting a phrase query & a patch to make weighting schemes overridable.
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/README.rst b/README.rst
index 26e5800..858713c 100644
--- a/README.rst
+++ b/README.rst
@@ -44,7 +44,11 @@ Installation
 Configuration
 -------------
 
-As well as the flags described `here <http://docs.haystacksearch.org/dev/settings.html>`_, the xapian backend includes and additional `HAYSTACK_XAPIAN_FLAGS` variable to further configure how indexes are stored and manipulated.  By default, this value is set to `FLAG_PHRASE | FLAG_BOOLEAN | FLAG_LOVEHATE | FLAG_WILDCARD | FLAG_PURE_NOT`.  See the `Xapian documentation <http://xapian.org/docs/apidoc/html/classXapian_1_1QueryParser.html>`_ for further explanation of the available Xapian.QueryParser flags.
+As well as the flags described `here <http://docs.haystacksearch.org/dev/settings.html>`_, the xapian backend includes two additional variables:
+
+    - `HAYSTACK_XAPIAN_FLAGS` -- used to further configure how indexes are stored and manipulated.  By default, this value is set to `FLAG_PHRASE | FLAG_BOOLEAN | FLAG_LOVEHATE | FLAG_WILDCARD | FLAG_PURE_NOT`.  See the `Xapian::QueryParser::feature_flag in the Xapian documentation <http://xapian.org/docs/apidoc/html/classXapian_1_1QueryParser.html>`_ for further explanation of the available Xapian.QueryParser flags.
+
+    - `HAYSTACK_XAPIAN_WEIGHTING_SCHEME` -- used to override the default weighting scheme used during search.  `HAYSTACK_XAPIAN_WEIGHTING_SCHEME` is assumed to be a tuple that corepsonds to the arguments to a BM25Weight constructor.  See `Xapian::BM25Weight::BM25Weight in the Xapian documentation <http://xapian.org/docs/apidoc/html/classXapian_1_1BM25Weight.html>`_ for further information.
 
 Testing
 -------
diff --git a/xapian_backend.py b/xapian_backend.py
index fbbe221..a600adb 100755
--- a/xapian_backend.py
+++ b/xapian_backend.py
@@ -396,6 +396,8 @@ class SearchBackend(BaseSearchBackend):
                 )
         
         enquire = xapian.Enquire(database)
+        if hasattr(settings, 'HAYSTACK_XAPIAN_WEIGHTING_SCHEME'):
+            enquire.set_weighting_scheme(xapian.BM25Weight(*settings.HAYSTACK_XAPIAN_WEIGHTING_SCHEME))
         enquire.set_query(query)
         
         if sort_by: