Trying to search unique results with Elasticsearch and highlighting feature - elasticsearch

Question

I am trying to implement an Elasticsearch query that will return highlighted distinct results based on the field queried upon.
I am aware that this isn't initially supported in ES and that most people are satisfied with aggregate features like facets. But since I need more data than what a facet can provide and that result highlighting is key to the project, I have been looking for alternate solutions.
I am using the Tire gem for a Rails project and so far this was my strategy:
Query Elastic Search with on one part the query string with highlighting, and on the other the search
{
"query": {
"match": {
"name": {
"query": "Banana",
"analyzer": "query_analyzer",
"operator": "AND"
}
}
},
"facets": {
"group_by": {
"terms": {
"fields": [
"name"
],
"size": 10,
"all_terms": false
}
}
},
"highlight": {
"fields": {
"name": {}
},
"pre_tags": [
"<span class=\"highlight\">"
],
"post_tags": [
"</span>"
]
},
"size": 100
}
Cross-reference the unique results with the first matching element from the query result to not only retrieve the missing information but also the highlighting for the result.
The problem with this approach is that even if I limit my query results to ten times more than my initial result size, the cross-reference could end up not finding 10 unique results in the query.
Also if I disregard the query and cross-reference the facet results with my database, I will lose the highlight.
I was also thinking that maybe I could even index my data differently a second time to enforce uniqueness server-side but this has proven to be another challenge altogether.
I am running out of ideas right now so if anyone sees something I'm missing I would be very grateful for any help.
Edit:
As an example, lets say I have these documents indexed in ES
[
{
id: 1,
name: 'Banana',
countryOfOrigin: 'Banana land'
},
{
id: 2,
name: 'Banana',
countryOfOrigin: 'Candy mountain'
},
{
id: 3,
name: 'Carrot',
countryOfOrigin: 'United Kingdom'
},
{
id: 4,
name: 'Barrel',
countryOfOrigin: 'Canada'
}
]
And I search for "Ba" in the same fashion as the query above, I would expect to find something like this:
{
"_shards":{
/* ... */
},
"hits":{
"total" : 2,
"hits" : [
{
"_index" : "my_index",
"_type" : "my_type",
"_id" : "1",
"_source" : {
"id": '1',
"name": 'Banana',
"countryOfOrigin": 'Banana land'
}
"highlight": {
"name": ["<span class='highlight'>Ba</span>nana"]
}
},
{
"_index" : "my_index",
"_type" : "my_type",
"_id" : "4",
"_source" : {
"id": '4',
"name": 'Barrel',
"countryOfOrigin": 'Canada'
}
"highlight": {
"name": ["<span class='highlight'>Ba</span>rrel"]
}
}
]
}
}
This would basically allow me to search for distinct item names in my records.