ElasticSearch Limit Filter Ambiguity

Question

I'm a bit unsure about Limit Filter's in ElasticSearch. I dont think Im understanding them correctly.

I am searching multiple shards on multiple nodes of health record information. I want the top lets say 50 highest scored results to my query.

In the docs it says

A limit filter limits the number of documents (per shard) to execute on.

And this SO response states

You should use filters when you don't care about scoring, they are faster and cache-able.

But if scoring does matter in my case should I not use Limit Filter to limit my returns to the only the top 50 highest scored results?

Would something like this be more accurate (in java):

SearchResponse response = client.prepareSearch().setSearchType(SearchType.DFS_QUERY_THEN_FETCH).setQuery(qb).setFrom(0).setSize(50).setExplain(true).execute().actionGet();

Update I stumbled on this SO post where the response states:

Right, you should use filters to exclude documents from being even considered when executing the query.

Okay. So in this case, perhaps I can refine my question to the following:

How do I only return the top 50 scored results? Is the above java reference the correct solution?

DrTech · Accepted Answer · 2014-01-31T15:29:25.900

All the limit filter does is to tell each shard to stop searching when a certain number of matching docs has been found. It doesn't say anything about those docs being the BEST matches.

For instance, let's say you have just one shard, and you index 10 docs with "foo bar" and another 10 docs with just "foo". Then you run this search:

GET /_search  
{
  "query": {
    "filtered": {
      "query": {
        "match": {
          "text": "foo bar"
        }
      },
      "filter": {
        "limit": {
          "value": 10
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

The match query looks for foo OR bar, so all 20 documents would match, but the 10 that have both terms would match better. The limit filter says: stop as soon as you have 10 docs, so you'll get 10 results back but they may not be the best 10 - instead, your results may include docs with just foo in them.

(Note: the limit is applied per shard, not per index.)

You say:

I want the top lets say 50 highest scored results to my query.

The fact that you want the highest automatically precludes the use of the limit filter. Instead, all you want to do is to set the size parameter to 50:

GET /_search
{
   "size": 50,
   "query": {....}
}

ElasticSearch Limit Filter Ambiguity

1 Answers1