Elasticsearch Essentials

Sorting your data

Data in Elasticsearch is by default sorted by a relevance score, which is computed using the Lucene scoring formula, TF/IDF. This relevance score is a floating point value that is returned with search results inside the _score parameter. By default, results are sorted in descending order.

Note

Sorting on nested and geo-points fields will be covered in the upcoming chapters.

See the following query for an example:

{
  "query": {
    "match": {
      "text": "data analytics"
    }
  }
}

We are searching for tweets that contain the data or analytics terms in their text fields. In some cases, however, we do not want the results to be sorted based on _score. Elasticsearch provides a way to sort documents in various ways. Let's explore how this can be done. ...