Question/Feature Request: Pinned/Forced Search Results at Specific Positions

[b-barry]

Description

Hello Typesense Team,

We are looking to build a feed builder for articles, similar to the book search functionality available on books-search.typesense.org. Our goal is to allow users to save their search queries, including filters, facets, and sorting options.

We would like to introduce an advanced feature that enables us to pin or force specific search results at a particular position in the results list. For example, when fetching all "Biography" books ordered by the last publication date, we want to display three preselected books as the first three results or based another query result, regardless of their publication date. This feature would be useful for scenarios where a user has paid to have their content appear in the top positions for a specific search query.

We are wondering if there is a simple and performant way to achieve this with Typesense. Ideally, we would like to avoid handling this logic on the client side.

Any guidance or suggestions you can provide would be greatly appreciated. If this feature is not currently available, we would like to request its consideration for future development.

Thank you for your time and for creating such an amazing search engine.

Steps to reproduce

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Expected Behavior

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Actual Behavior

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Metadata

Typesense Version:

OS:

[smlparry]

Hi there!

It seems like you are looking for the "Curation" feature: https://typesense.org/docs/26.0/api/curation.html

With this, you can specify what search results to "pin" to the top (via the "includes" property in an override)

[b-barry]

Hello,

Yes. Thanks for the quick response. It seems the override will works when we know the id. But I didn't find an option that allow to add a sub query ( dynamic). I would like to be able to add in the include a query to fetch for example 3 articles from another category and insert them from the position 10.
It is correct or I am missing something in the documentation?

[b-barry]

Also I was wondering if the includes can includes id from other collections?

[jasonbosco]

For that level of customization, you'd want to first run a search query to fetch document IDs to pin, and then send those IDs in the pinned_hits search parameter in the second search query (documented under this table), without using the overrides endpoint.

pinned_hits can be dynamically changed at search time using any criteria you need

[b-barry]

@jasonbosco @smlparry Thanks for the help. I will try it