Elasticsearch 5.x Cookbook - Third Edition

Sorting data using scripts

Elasticsearch provides scripting support for sorting functionality. In real-world applications, there is often a need to modify the default sort by match score using an algorithm that depends on the context and some external variables. Some common scenarios are as follows:

• Sorting places near a point
• Sorting by most read articles
• Sorting items by custom user logic
• Sorting items by revenue

Tip

Because the compute of scores on a large dataset is very CPU intensive, if you use scripting it's better execute it on a small dataset using standard score queries for detecting the top documents, and then execute a rescoring on the top subset.

Getting ready

You need an up-and-running Elasticsearch installation as we described in the