Question

I have a problem with location queries returning erroneous results in ElasticSearch.

In our system, a business search engine, every search takes two inputs: a location, and a query-string, e.g.

q=sushi
location=Greenwich Village, New York, New York

I want the search to show me sushi in Greenwich Village first, then sushi outside of Greenwich Village, but to never show me non-sushi results.

The problem is, because of the location query, anything in Greenwich Village gets matched — lawyers, doctors, whatever. I’d like say the following to ElasticSearch:

If q matches, then location doesn’t have to (it’s OK to return sushi outside of Greenwich Village), but if location matches, don’t return it unless q matches also (not OK to return non-sushi businesses in Greenwich Village).

Anyone have any thoughts on how to do this?

Answer 1

It sounds like you want to search for “sushi” (you don’t want non-sushi results) but sort your results by location (you want Greenwich Village results first).

If you are storing locations as geo points, you can simply use distance to sort your results.

If location is just a field, and you can only know if the business is inside or outside of a location, you can use Custom Filters Score query to boost relevancy of the results in the desired location. The query part should contain the search for “sushi” and the filters part should contain the search for location.