Improving the relevancy of search results

In general, Elasticsearch is used for searching while it is a data analysis tool. In this respect, improving query relevance is an important issue. Of course, searching also means querying and scoring, thus it is a very important part of querying in Apache Lucene as well. We can use the re-scoring mechanism to improve the query's relevance. In addition to the capabilities of document scoring in the Apache Lucene library, Elasticsearch provides different query types to manipulate the score of the results returned by our queries. In this section, you will find several tips on this issue.

Boosting the query

Boosting queries allows us to effectively demote results that match a given query. This feature is very useful in that we can send some irrelevant records of the result set to the back. For example, we have an index that stores the skills of developers and we're looking for developers who know the Java language. We use a query such as the following...