# A site with multiple countries - best way to organize the index / indices?

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/a-site-with-multiple-countries-best-way-to-organize-the-index-indices/45866>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [March 31, 2016, 3:35am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/a-site-with-multiple-countries-best-way-to-organize-the-index-indices/45866 "2016-03-31T03:35:47Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![ryac](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/ryac/32/11727_2.png) [@ryac](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/ryac)\
**Post date:** [March 31, 2016, 3:35am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/a-site-with-multiple-countries-best-way-to-organize-the-index-indices/45866/1 "2016-03-31T03:35:47Z")

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Hi everyone,

We're working on a site that has multiple countries and I'm just wondering what's the best way to organize the indices. There's not much variation between the countries - they're all similar collections so one way would be to put all countries in one index (but there's a lot of them) and then always add a filter to the search query based on the country users are searching from.

The other option would be to create a separate index for each country. This seems cleaner, but then if there was a change to the mappings, I'd need to make this update for each country.

Any advice on this?

Thanks,  
Ryan

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**Author:** ![javanna](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/javanna/32/4698_2.png) [@javanna](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/javanna)\
**Post date:** [April 1, 2016, 2:21pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/a-site-with-multiple-countries-best-way-to-organize-the-index-indices/45866/2 "2016-04-01T14:21:20Z")

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Hi Ryan,  
I guess that multiple countries means also multiple languages? Then having one index per country with one type each, and each one a different mapping that works well with each specific language is what I would do.

There are different ways to do this though. Maybe you can tell us more about what the website does and how the users search, so we can have a better idea of how to tackle it?

Thanks  
Luca

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**Author:** ![ryac](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/ryac/32/11727_2.png) [@ryac](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/ryac)\
**Post date:** [April 5, 2016, 3:21am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/a-site-with-multiple-countries-best-way-to-organize-the-index-indices/45866/3 "2016-04-05T03:21:53Z")

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Hi Javanna,

Yes there will be multiple languages as well, I forgot to mention that.

We'll be creating a separate index for each country and language. Thanks!

Ryan

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**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\
**Post date:** [July 5, 2017, 11:02pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/a-site-with-multiple-countries-best-way-to-organize-the-index-indices/45866/4 "2017-07-05T23:02:24Z")

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