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 th

Answer 1

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"
        }
    }
}
...

Answer 2

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.