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 Downloading and installing Elasticsearch recipe in Chapter 2, Downloading and Setup.

To execute curl via the command-line you need to install curl for your operating system.

To correctly execute the following commands, you need an index populated with the...