Elasticsearch provides scripting support for sorting functionality. In real-world applications, there is often a need to modify the default sorting using an algorithm that is dependent 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
Because the computing of scores on a large dataset is very CPU-intensive, if you use scripting, then it's better to execute it on a small dataset using standard score queries for detecting the top documents, and then execute a rescoring on the top subset.