Elasticsearch sort by text field keyword - sorting

Question

I have index with this settings
"analysis": {
"filter": {
"autocomplete_filter": {
"type": "edge_ngram",
"min_gram": 1,
"max_gram": 10
}
},
"analyzer": {
"autocomplete": {
"type": "custom",
"tokenizer": "standard",
"filter": [
"lowercase",
"autocomplete_filter",
"asciifolding",
"elision",
"standard"
]
},
"autocomplete_search": {
"tokenizer": "lowercase"
}
},
"tokenizer": {
"autocomplete": {
"type": "edge_ngram",
"min_gram": "3",
"max_gram": "32"
}
}
}
and have mapping for the name field
"name": {
"type": "text",
"analyzer": "autocomplete",
"search_analyzer": "autocomplete_search",
"fields": {
"keyword": {
"type": "keyword"
}
}
}
now I have several examples of names in documents. Name is one field with first name and last name inside.
--макс---
-макс -
{something} макс
макс {something}
I am using this query to find the documents with that name with alphabetical sorting
{
"query": {
"match": {
"name": {
"query": "макс",
"operator" : "and"
}
}
},
"sort": [
{"name.keyword" : "asc"}
]
}
it is bringing results as I wrote. but I expect that макс {something} will come for the first position than others because it is starting with a query which I wrote.
Can somebody help be there

Answer 1

So the query is by default scoring documents based on "how well they matched", this score is used to rank the "best matches first". But as soon as you define an sort you are saying ignore the query score and only using this field to rank the results. Now the results are still restricted to only documents matching the query but the idea of best match is lost unless you keep the special value _score in your sort statement somewhere.
Like this:
"sort": [
{
"productLine.keyword": {
"order": "desc"
}
},
{
"_score": {
"order": "desc"
}
}
]
Maybe you can just remove the sort and get the results you want based on default score sorting. Include a few example documents to make this fully reproducible if you want more support from the SO community