Search after for efficient pagination in Elasticsearch - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Search after for efficient pagination

📖 Scenario: You are building a search feature for a large online store. The store has thousands of products, and you want to show search results page by page without slowing down the system.Using Elasticsearch's search_after feature helps you get the next pages quickly without repeating the same results.

🎯 Goal: Build a simple Elasticsearch query that uses search_after to get the second page of search results sorted by price and product ID.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create an initial search query sorted by price and product_id.

Add a search_after parameter to get the next page after a given last result.

Use exact field names and values as specified.

Print the final JSON query.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Online stores and apps use search_after to show fast, smooth pages of search results without slowing down as data grows.

💼 Career

Knowing how to use search_after is important for backend developers and data engineers working with Elasticsearch to build scalable search features.

1

Create the initial search query

Create a variable called query that holds a JSON object with a sort key. Sort by price ascending and then by product_id ascending.

Elasticsearch

# Create the initial query with sorting
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a dictionary with a sort key that has a list of sorting rules.

2

Add the search_after parameter

Add a search_after key to the query dictionary with the value [100, "abc123"] to get results after price 100 and product_id 'abc123'.

Elasticsearch

query = {
    "sort": [
        {"price": "asc"},
        {"product_id": "asc"}
    ],
    # Add search_after here
}
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Add the search_after key with the exact list value inside the query dictionary.

3

Add a size parameter to limit results

Add a size key to the query dictionary and set it to 5 to limit the number of results per page.

Elasticsearch

query = {
    "sort": [
        {"price": "asc"},
        {"product_id": "asc"}
    ],
    "search_after": [100, "abc123"],
    # Add size here
}
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Set the size key to control how many results come back per page.

4

Print the final query JSON

Print the query variable to show the final JSON query.

Elasticsearch

# Print the query
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print(query) to display the final query.