# Best way to trim results by score?
**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/best-way-to-trim-results-by-score/165795
**Category:** Elasticsearch
**Created:** [January 25, 2019, 2:55pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/best-way-to-trim-results-by-score/165795 "2019-01-25T14:55:03Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@jmr317](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/jmr317)
#### Post date: [January 25, 2019, 2:55pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/best-way-to-trim-results-by-score/165795/1 "2019-01-25T14:55:04Z")
Some of my search results returns a total of over 10k documents, varying from a high score (in my most recent search, ~75) to a very low score (less than 5). Other queries return a high score of ~20 and a low score of ~1.
Does anyone have a good solution for trimming off the less relevant documents? A java or query implementation would work. I've thought about using min\_score, but i'm wary of that since it has to be a constant number, and some of the scores of my responses are a lot closer than the above. I suppose I could come up with some formula based off of the returned scores to create a cutoff for every response, but I was curious if anyone has come up with a solution to a similar use case?
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### Author:  [@jpountz](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/jpountz)
#### Post date: [February 1, 2019, 9:20am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/best-way-to-trim-results-by-score/165795/2 "2019-02-01T09:20:09Z")
Hi Jon,
In general it is recommended to not do anything like that and just return documents in descending order of score so that the most relevant ones appear first.
Instead of using a score cutoff, the general approach is usually to use a cutoff on the rank and a rescorer. For instance you could take the 10 best documents by relevance and reorder them based on some other criteria that denotes the authority or popularity of the document: [https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/search-request-rescore.html](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/search-request-rescore.html)
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### Author:  [@Mark\_Harwood](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Mark_Harwood)
#### Post date: [February 1, 2019, 9:33am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/best-way-to-trim-results-by-score/165795/3 "2019-02-01T09:33:29Z")
> [@jmr317](#):
>
> Does anyone have a good solution for trimming off the less relevant documents?
If you're building a faceted search interface using aggregations it's often useful to do this to avoid a long-tail making a nonsense of your facet summaries. Someone searching for a video by typing `ice age` shouldn't be told there's 300 matches in the electricals department just because you matched a lot of refrigerators with an `ice` dispenser.
One technique I've seen used in e-commerce sites is to start with a very tight interpretation of user input e.g. running the input `ice age` as a strict `"ice age"` phrase match. Only if the results are very few in number do they re-run a relaxed form of the search i.e. `ice OR age`. Obviously picking what that magic threshold number is can be tricky and offering users ways to rewrite the query can help.
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### Author:  [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [March 1, 2019, 9:33am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/best-way-to-trim-results-by-score/165795/4 "2019-03-01T09:33:42Z")
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