diff --git a/CHANGES.txt b/CHANGES.txt
index 72e43d2055b..28b93ad8b48 100644
--- a/CHANGES.txt
+++ b/CHANGES.txt
@@ -177,6 +177,8 @@ New features
 
 15. LUCENE-1295: Added new method to MoreLikeThis for retrieving interesting terms and made retrieveTerms(int) public. (Grant Ingersoll)
 
+16. LUCENE-1298: MoreLikeThis can now accept a custom Similarity (Grant Ingersoll)
+
 Optimizations
 
  1. LUCENE-705: When building a compound file, use
diff --git a/contrib/queries/src/java/org/apache/lucene/search/similar/MoreLikeThis.java b/contrib/queries/src/java/org/apache/lucene/search/similar/MoreLikeThis.java
index af715818ae4..e97f0696704 100644
--- a/contrib/queries/src/java/org/apache/lucene/search/similar/MoreLikeThis.java
+++ b/contrib/queries/src/java/org/apache/lucene/search/similar/MoreLikeThis.java
@@ -276,7 +276,7 @@ public final class MoreLikeThis {
     /**
      * For idf() calculations.
      */
-    private Similarity similarity = new DefaultSimilarity();
+    private Similarity similarity;// = new DefaultSimilarity();
 
     /**
      * IndexReader to use
@@ -287,10 +287,24 @@ public final class MoreLikeThis {
      * Constructor requiring an IndexReader.
      */
     public MoreLikeThis(IndexReader ir) {
-        this.ir = ir;
+        this(ir, new DefaultSimilarity());
     }
 
-    /**
+    public MoreLikeThis(IndexReader ir, Similarity sim){
+      this.ir = ir;
+      this.similarity = sim;
+    }
+
+
+  public Similarity getSimilarity() {
+    return similarity;
+  }
+
+  public void setSimilarity(Similarity similarity) {
+    this.similarity = similarity;
+  }
+
+  /**
      * Returns an analyzer that will be used to parse source doc with. The default analyzer
      * is the {@link #DEFAULT_ANALYZER}.
      *