# Recall Stage vs LTR: am I duplicating logic or losing good results in Elasticsearch?
**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/recall-stage-vs-ltr-am-i-duplicating-logic-or-losing-good-results-in-elasticsearch/383630
**Category:** Elasticsearch
**Created:** [November 24, 2025, 8:15pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/recall-stage-vs-ltr-am-i-duplicating-logic-or-losing-good-results-in-elasticsearch/383630 "2025-11-24T20:15:27Z")
**Posts on this page:** 2
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Shell\_Dias](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Shell_Dias)
#### Post date: [November 24, 2025, 8:15pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/recall-stage-vs-ltr-am-i-duplicating-logic-or-losing-good-results-in-elasticsearch/383630/1 "2025-11-24T20:15:27Z")
Hey folks,
I’m building a search pipeline using **Elasticsearch + Vector Search + LTR** , and I’ve hit a conceptual conflict.
Classic pipeline:
1. Recall (BM25 / Vector / Hybrid)
2. LTR (rerank top-K)
3. Pagination
All good. But here’s where things get messy:
* * *
## **1. Recall doesn’t know what “good” means.**
It only fetches _candidates_.
It doesn’t understand price, discount, margin, conversion but **LTR does**.
So the fear is:
> “What if the _good_ products never make it into the top-K? LTR will never see them.”
How is this measured in practice? Recall@K?
* * *
## **2. Where does business logic belong? Query or LTR?**
If I add price/popularity boosting in Recall:
- feels like I’m **duplicating** model logic
- feels like I’m **biasing** the Recall artificially
- feels like LTR becomes useless
If I **don’t** add anything:
- Recall becomes “blind”
- good products fall outside top-K
- meaning LTR becomes pointless
How do you balance this?
* * *
## **3. What’s the real boundary between Recall and Rerank?**
The theory says:
- Recall = don’t miss anything potentially relevant
- LTR = choose the best among them
But how does this translate into Elasticsearch best practices?
* * *
## **Short version of my questions**
- How do you ensure good items aren’t lost in Recall?
- How do you measure/tune Recall@K realistically?
- How much logic should live in the query vs the model?
- Any recommended pattern from Elastic for hybrid pipelines?
Thanks!
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### Author:  [@Shell\_Dias](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Shell_Dias)
#### Post date: [December 3, 2025, 8:04pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/recall-stage-vs-ltr-am-i-duplicating-logic-or-losing-good-results-in-elasticsearch/383630/2 "2025-12-03T20:04:40Z")
Alone?