Elasticsearch Completion Suggester - Sort suggestions

Question

Is it possible to have the Elasticsearch completion suggester return the results in sorted order? I'm following the example in this Elasticsearch blog post and added additional hotels:

{"name": "Mercure Hotel", "city": "Munich", "name_suggest": "Mercure Hotel"}
{"name": "Mercure Motel", "city": "Munich", "name_suggest": "Mercure Motel"}
{"name": "Mercure1", "city": "Munich", "name_suggest": "Mercure1"}
{"name": "Mercure2", "city": "Munich", "name_suggest": "Mercure2"}
{"name": "Mercure3", "city": "Munich", "name_suggest": "Mercure3"}

When I post the following to the _suggest endpoint...

{
  "hotels":
  {
    "text": "Me", "completion": {"field":"name_suggest", "size":10}
  }
}

...my results are ordered like so (all with score: 1):

• Mercure Motel
• Mercure Hotel Munich
• Mercure1
• Mercure2
• Mercure Hotel
• Mercure3

I'd like them to be sorted lexically, so "Mercure Hotel" comes before "Mercure Motel" at the very least.

The results are ordered the same even if I post the text "Mercure2" to _suggest. My expectation is that Mercure2 would be the first suggestion, if not the only one.

When I don't find that others are having the same problem it usually means I'm doing something wrong or completely misunderstand the topic. Am I expecting too much from the completion suggester or do I need to make a configuration change to achieve what I'm trying to do?

Answer 1

Add a weight to each document – the higher the number, the higher it's prioritized.

That is, sort your output strings lexically and then enumerate them. Finally, subtract their index from 2 ** 31 - 1 (the highest priority) to get suggestions in lexically ascending order.