# Is there a way to interleave (round-robin) search results in Elasticsearch?

**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/is-there-a-way-to-interleave-round-robin-search-results-in-elasticsearch/379943
**Category:** Elasticsearch
**Created:** [July 9, 2025, 11:33am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/is-there-a-way-to-interleave-round-robin-search-results-in-elasticsearch/379943 "2025-07-09T11:33:36Z")
**Posts on this page:** 2
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![Rafaela\_Machado](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/rafaela_machado/32/144078_2.png) [@Rafaela\_Machado](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Rafaela_Machado)
#### Post date: [July 9, 2025, 11:33am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/is-there-a-way-to-interleave-round-robin-search-results-in-elasticsearch/379943/1 "2025-07-09T11:33:36Z")

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Hi Elasticsearch team and community,

I’m working on a app where I need to:

- Sort products primarily by a priority field (`priority`), descending.
- But also **interleave (round-robin) results from different groups**, so that no two consecutive products come from the same group.
- Ideally, the interleaving respects the weighted priority of products (higher priority groups appear more frequently but results are still mixed).
- Support pagination (e.g., 24 results per page).

For example, if I have groups with priorities:

- GROUP A: 20
- GROUP B: 20
- GROUP C: 20
- GROUP D: 1

I want results like:  
`[GROUP A Product 1, GROUP B Product 1, GROUP C Product 1, GROUP A Product 2, GROUP B Product 2, ...]`

I have explored:

- Sorting by `priority` — works but groups groups together, causing consecutive items from the same group.

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?

Thanks in advance!

---

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![dadoonet](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/dadoonet/32/137187_2.png) [@dadoonet](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/dadoonet)
#### Post date: [July 9, 2025, 2:15pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/is-there-a-way-to-interleave-round-robin-search-results-in-elasticsearch/379943/2 "2025-07-09T14:15:30Z")

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Welcome!

I’m wondering if you should use something like a `terms` agg by group and then a `top_hits` for each group.

Something like:

```json
POST /sales/_search?size=0
{
  "aggs": {
    "top_tags": {
      "terms": {
        "field": "group",
        "size": 4
      },
      "aggs": {
        "top_hits_per_group": {
          "top_hits": {
            "size": 24
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

```

Then may be solve the rest of your business case on the application side.

Would that work?