More Examples of 'search_after'?

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
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Please excuse me for being obtuse, but the explanation of how the 'search_after' query works is completely confusing to me

https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/search-request-search-after.html

I don't really understand what these numbers are and how do they relate to other examples of queries one might use?
"search_after": [1463538857, "654323"],

Any help or examples in a different context will be much appreciated! Aloha :hibiscus::call_me_hand:

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Google answered my question, and indeed I was missing something obvious. For others who are wondering here is a very clear example (something like this could make the ES docs a little more clear):

  • If there are 31 annotations—1 for each day in October—the search parameter combination of sort =updated, order =desc, limit =10, and search_after =2018-10-05 will retrieve annotations made from the 6th of October to the 16th of October.
  • If there are 31 annotations with IDs 0-31, the search parameter combination of sort =id, order =asc, limit =10, and search_after =5, will return the annotations with IDs 6-16.

Searching using offset and limit is inefficient because elasticsearch must load all the annotations ( offset + limit number of annotations) into memory and sort them before returning the window of annotations defined by offset and limit . search_after does not require all the annotations to be loaded and sorted because it can be applied as a filter on the search query itself—as opposed to offset , which must be applied after the initial search. This is why search_after is more efficient and, while the old parameter offset does remain, it is not recommended to use it.

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