Boosting search in specific fields and sorting by rank

Question

I have the following query:

{
    "sort": [
        {"actual_rank" : "desc"}
    ],
    "query": {
        "multi_match" : {
            "query" : term,
            "fields" : [ "title^3" , "category^5" , "entities.name^5"]
        }
    }
}

The problem with this query is that the sorting by rank makes the specified fields boosting pretty irrelevant(a best ranked item in which the term doesn't appear in the specified fields will be higher placed than a worst ranked item in which the term appears).

I'd like to decrease the importance of the sorting to get better results.

Answer 1

Actually, according to the sorting docs (http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/reference/api/search/sort/), you need to enable the track_scores setting if you want scores to be calculated at all when sorting on a field.

However, I'm guessing you want to do some custom scoring (see http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/reference/query-dsl/custom-score-query/ and/or http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/reference/query-dsl/custom-filters-score-query/). Examples of those are excellent in this blog post (http://jontai.me/blog/2013/01/advanced-scoring-in-elasticsearch/)

I'd post code, but I think the blog post provides a thorough view.