[[search-request-rescore]]
=== Rescoring

Rescoring can help to improve precision by reordering just the top (eg
100 - 500) documents returned by the
<<search-request-query,`query`>> and
<<search-request-filter,`filter`>> phases, using a
secondary (usually more costly) algorithm, instead of applying the
costly algorithm to all documents in the index.

A `rescore` request is executed on each shard before it returns its
results to be sorted by the node handling the overall search request.

Currently the rescore API has only one implementation: the query
rescorer, which uses a query to tweak the scoring. In the future, 
alternative rescorers may be made available, for example, a pair-wise rescorer.

*Note:* the `rescore` phase is not executed when
<<search-request-search-type,`search_type`>> is set
to `scan` or `count`.

==== Query rescorer

The query rescorer executes a second query only on the Top-K results
returned by the <<search-request-query,`query`>> and
<<search-request-filter,`filter`>> phases. The
number of docs which will be examined on each shard can be controlled by
the `window_size` parameter, which defaults to
<<search-request-from-size,`from` and `size`>>.

The scores from the original query and the rescore query are combined
linearly to produce the final `_score` for each document. The relative
importance of the original query and of the rescore query can be
controlled with the `query_weight` and `rescore_query_weight`
respectively. Both default to `1`.

For example:

[source,js]
--------------------------------------------------
curl -s -XPOST 'localhost:9200/_search' -d '{
   "query" : {
      "match" : {
         "field1" : {
            "operator" : "OR",
            "query" : "the quick brown",
            "type" : "boolean"
         }
      }
   },
   "rescore" : {
      "window_size" : 50,
      "query" : {
         "rescore_query" : {
            "match" : {
               "field1" : {
                  "query" : "the quick brown",
                  "type" : "phrase",
                  "slop" : 2
               }
            }
         },
         "query_weight" : 0.7,
         "rescore_query_weight" : 1.2
      }
   }
}
'
--------------------------------------------------