Elasticsearch: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 38. Geo-aggregations

Although filtering or scoring results by geolocation is useful, it is often more useful to be able to present information to the user on a map. A search may return way too many results to be able to display each geo-point individually, but geo-aggregations can be used to cluster geo-points into more manageable buckets.

Three aggregations work with fields of type geo_point:

geo_distance

Groups documents into concentric circles around a central point.

geohash_grid

Groups documents by geohash cell, for display on a map.

geo_bounds

Returns the lat/lon coordinates of a bounding box that would encompass all of the geo-points. This is useful for choosing the correct zoom level when displaying a map.

geo_distance Aggregation

The geo_distance agg is useful for searches such as to “find all pizza restaurants within 1km of me.” The search results should, indeed, be limited to the 1km radius specified by the user, but we can add “another result found within 2km”:

GET /attractions/restaurant/_search
{
  "query": {
    "filtered": {
      "query": {
        "match": { 
          "name": "pizza"
        }
      },
      "filter": {
        "geo_bounding_box": {
          "location": { 
            "top_left": {
              "lat":  40,8,
              "lon": -74.1
            },
            "bottom_right": {
              "lat":  40.4,
              "lon": -73.7
            }
          }
        }
      }
    }
  },
  "aggs": {
    "per_ring": {
      "geo_distance":