Saturday, February 15, 2014

Document boosting in Elasticsearch

There has been some discussion on the Elasticsearch mailing list lately about applying index-time boosts at the document level, aka document boosting. The practice has been discouraged (in fact, the Elasticsearch team has officially deprecated document boosting) in favor of query-time scoring, but without any detailed explanation why. Instead of repeating myself each time the question is asked, I have decided to detail the various reasons why document boosts should no longer be used.