Absolute Quality threshold for search results

Hi all

We are using elastic search(ES) to match candidates with jobs. In general, this works quite well. However, for some candidates there is only a very limited amount of relevant jobs, e.g. there are not that many instrument makers vacancies. ES correctly returns the few relevant vacancies as the top results, but then comes a long list of irrelevant jobs.

What we now want to do is to cut off the result list after the last relevant vacancy. The first approach that comes to mind would be to set some minimal score threshold. This doesn't work, however, because ES scores are not absolute measures of quality and can vary between queries due to the query normalization factor. Another option we tried was increasing the min_should_match value, but this had the bad side effect of also suppressing a lot of relevant documents.

Is there any way to cut off irrelevant documents in ES searches? Has anybody else found a solution to this problem? Or is this just not possible with plain ES?

All the best, Philipp

Why not use filters as well?