Controlling relevancy with custom scoring

In most cases, you are good to go with the default scoring algorithms of Elasticsearch to return the most relevant results. However, some cases require you to have more control on the calculation of a score. This is especially required while implementing domain-specific logic such as finding the relevant candidates for a job, where you need to implement a very specific scoring formula. Elasticsearch provides you with the function_score query to take control of all these things.

Note

This chapter covers the code examples only in Java because a Python client gives you the flexibility to pass the query inside the body parameter of a search function as you have learned in the previous chapters. Python programmers can simply use the example queries in the same way. There is no extra module required to execute these queries. You can still download the Python code for this chapter from the Packt website.

The function_score query

The function_score query allows...