Elasticsearch sorting on string not returning expected results

Question

When sorting on a string field with multiple words, Elasticsearch is splitting the string value and using the min or max as the sort value. I.E.: when sorting on a field with the value "Eye of the Tiger" in ascending order, the sort value is: "Eye" and when sorting in descending order the value is: "Tiger".

Lets say I have "Eye of the Tiger" and "Wheel of Death" as entries in my index, when I do an ascending sort on this field, I would expect, "Eye of the Tiger" to be first, since "E" comes before "W", but what I'm seeing when sorting on this field, "Wheel of Death" is coming up first, since "D" is the min value of that term and "E" is the min value of "Eye of the Tiger".

Does anyone know how to turn off this behavior and just allow a regular sort on this string field?

how is that field mapped? Sounds like it is tokenized into pieces, not analyzed as a whole string. You might need "index": "not_analyzed" — mconlin
– mconlin, Commented Jan 27, 2014 at 19:51
The field is mapped as a string. So I would basically need to do that for every field that I wanted to sort on that contained multiple terms? I was doing some more digging and came across this one: stackoverflow.com/questions/10583013/… which sounds similar to what your suggesting. Is this the only way in Elasticsearch? it just feels pretty clunky — willz
– willz, Commented Jan 27, 2014 at 20:03
Here is a helpful blog post related to the topic awesomism.co.uk/sorting-string-fields-with-elasticsearch — Ryan
– Ryan, Commented Aug 5, 2014 at 16:55

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 12:34:01Z

10

As mconlin mentioned if you want to sort on the unanalyzed doc field you need to specify "index": "not_analyzed" to sort as you described. But if you're looking to be able to keep this field tokenized to search on, this post by sloan shows a great example. Using multi-field to keep two different mappings for a field is very common in Elasticsearch.

Hope this helps, let me know if I can offer more explanation.

edited May 23, 2017 at 12:34

CommunityBot

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answered Jan 28, 2014 at 16:18

Michael at qbox.io

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Felix · Accepted Answer · 2015-01-22 10:06:22Z

4

If you want the sorting to be case-insensitive "index": "not_analyzed" doesn't work, so I've created a custom sort analyzer.

index-settings.yml

index :   
    analysis :
        analyzer :
            sort :
                type : custom
                tokenizer : keyword
                filter : [lowercase]

Mapping:

...
"articleName": {
    "type": "string",
    "analyzer": "standard",
    "fields": {
        "sort": {
            "type": "string",
            "analyzer": "sort"
        }
    }
}
...

answered Jan 22, 2015 at 10:06

Felix

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