Assign boost to document at index time

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

I just read much documents regarding to assign a static boost to a specific document at index time. Some of the docs and function are deprecated. So I am not sure what to use for this particular use case:

I index two simple documents:

Germany and Gerogia in the same index. Germany should have a higher ranking by default because its a country.

Whats the best ways to get this working?

And is this article a good source to get it working?

I'm using version 5.5.0

Thanks in advance

2

I think your question duplicates the one you opened previously at Pre boost while indexing

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Yes. I was not able to delete the previous one. The description of the use case of the post is simpler than in the other question.

4

Some additional information regarding my researches today.

One option is to use field_value_factor. Which means I create a new field in my document similar to weight to calculate the score by query time. Docs

An additional or other option is the boost on a specific field. In simple words I create another field in my document for example country:boolean and by query time I boost the field country by any value if its true. Docs

What do you think? Is that the right way to go?

5

I wrote about using function scores over index-time boosts over four years
ago: http://blog.brusic.com/2014/02/document-boosting-in-elasticsearch.html

Since then the function score query has improved, with options such
as field_value_factor. The main takeaway is the same, function scores after
the scoring, to me at least, are more consistent and easier to read.

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Thanks Ivan, nice post. Makes some stuff more clear. I will need the stuff for autocomplete functions. If you have any other related documents to share, would be good the have those.

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Quite a few things have changed in the past four years since I wrote that
blog post, such as more options in the function score query and field norms
have more precision besides a single byte in Lucene. But ultimately, such
logic does not belong in TD-IDF/BM-25, but outside of it. Besides, with
function scores, you can change the boost level on the fly whenever you
create the query. Waaaaay easier to A/B test different values.

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