Update the score of Pinned Documents in Elastic Search - elasticsearch

Question

I have a requirement to show some documents always on top of search results and for that, I have used pinned query to pin some documents and the pinned documents will have a score value of 1.7014122E38.
But I have another requirement to modify this score of pinned documents which I'm unable to achieve at the query level.
Sample Documents
"docs": [
{
"_id": 1,
"name": "jack"
},
{
"_id": 2,
"name": "ryan"
},
{
"_id": 3,
"name": "mark"
},
{
"_id": 4,
"name": "taylor"
},
{
"_id": 5,
"name": "taylor"
}
]
}
ES Query
{
"query": {
"bool": {
"should": [
{
"pinned": {
"ids": [
"3"
],
"organic": {
"query": {
"bool": {
"must": [
{
"multi_match": {
"name": "taylor",
"fields": [
"name"
]
}
}
]
}
}
}
}
}
]
}
}
}
Now I want to multiply the pinned document score weight with some value which I'm unable to achieve in ES.
Can someone please help me to solve this requirement?

Answer 1

Since the pinned queries' scores are calculated at query time, there's no way of knowing what they're will end up being. It could be 1.7014122E38 but also 1.7014122402528844E38 etc.
What you could do is use a sort script and check whether the implicit score is unusually high (I chose Integer.MAXV_VALUE as the boundary) which'd indicate whether or not you're dealing with a pinned. If that's the case, you can override the pinned documents' scores however you like.
POST your-index/_search?track_scores&filter_path=hits.hits._id,hits.hits._source,hits.hits.sort
{
"query": {
"bool": {
"should": [
{
"pinned": {
"ids": [ "3" ],
"organic": {
"bool": {
"must": [
{
"multi_match": {
"query": "taylor",
"fields": [
"name"
]
}
}
]
}
}
}
}
]
}
},
"sort": [
{
"_script": {
"order": "desc",
"type": "number",
"script": {
"source": "_score >= Integer.MAX_VALUE ? params.score_rewrite : _score",
"params": {
"score_rewrite": 42
}
}
}
}
]
}
Note that it's necessary to set the track_scores URI parameter because when sorting on a field, the scores are not computed by default.
That way, the resulting hits would look along the lines of:
{
"hits" : {
"hits" : [
{
"_id" : "3", <-- pinned ID
"_source" : {
"name" : "mark"
},
"sort" : [
42.0 <-- overridden sort
]
},
{
"_id" : "4",
"_source" : {
"name" : "taylor"
},
"sort" : [
0.875468730926 <-- default sort
]
},
{
"_id" : "5",
"_source" : {
"name" : "taylor"
},
"sort" : [
0.875468730926
]
}
]
}
}
P.S.: Integer.MAX_VALUE is arbitrary and there's absolutely no guarantee that it'll catch all pinned docs. In other words, a bit of experimentation will be needed to choose a bulletproof boundary.