Interleaving search results in ElasticSearch

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

Hi Elasticsearch community,

I’m implementing a search feature where items belong to groups, and some groups are marked as premium. I want search results to:

  1. Show all items from premium groups first, then non-premium items.

  2. Interleave items across premium groups in a round-robin fashion, e.g.:

group1 → item1
group2 → item1
group3 → item1
group1 → item2
group2 → item2
...

  • Filters may be applied (e.g., ranges, categories).

  • Supports pagination (size=24, for example)

I’ve explored:

  • Pre-computing a rank within each group — breaks when filters are applied and remove items.

  • terms agg by group and then a top_hits for each group - not exactly what i want too and does not support pagination. Also, i don’t have a fixed amount of premium groups or items.

Is there any native or recommended way to achieve this kind of weighted round-robin or interleaving within Elasticsearch’s query or sorting capabilities?

If not, are there best practices or patterns to implement this efficiently, maybe combining ES with application-side logic? However, the application-side logic can not have an impact in application performance.

Thanks in advance!