Return distance in elasticsearch results?

Yes you can, by using a script field.

For instance, assuming your doc have a geo-point field called location, you could use the following:

(note the \u0027 is just an escaped single quote, so \u0027location\u0027 is really 'location')

curl -XGET 'http://127.0.0.1:9200/geonames/_search?pretty=1'  -d '{   "script_fields" : {      "distance" : {         "params" : {            "lat" : 2.27,            "lon" : 50.3         },         "script" : "doc[\u0027location\u0027].distanceInKm(lat,lon)"      }   }}'# [Thu Feb 16 11:20:29 2012] Response:# {#    "hits" : {#       "hits" : [#          {#             "_score" : 1,#             "fields" : {#                "distance" : 466.844095463887#             },#             "_index" : "geonames_1318324623",#             "_id" : "6436641_en",#             "_type" : "place"#          },... etc

If you want the _source field to be returned as well, then you can specify that as follows:

curl -XGET 'http://127.0.0.1:9200/geonames/_search?pretty=1'  -d '{   "fields" : [ "_source" ],   "script_fields" : {      "distance" : {         "params" : {            "lat" : 2.27,            "lon" : 50.3         },         "script" : "doc[\u0027location\u0027].distanceInKm(lat,lon)"      }   }}'

Great answer by DrTech ... here is an updated version for Elasticsearch 5.x with painless as the script language. I also added "store_fields" to include _source in the result:

curl -XGET 'http://127.0.0.1:9200/geonames/_search?pretty=1'  -d '{  "stored_fields" : [ "_source" ],  "script_fields" : {    "distance" : {      "script" : {        "inline": "doc['location'].arcDistance(params.lat,params.lon) * 0.001",        "lang": "painless",        "params": {          "lat": 2.27,          "lon": 50.3        }      }    }  }}'

To return distance aswel as as all the default fields/source, you could also do this:

To avoid that it sorts by distance (primarily) you just sort by _score (or whatever you want the results sorted by) first.

{   "sort": [    "_score",    {      "_geo_distance": {        "location": {           "lat":  40.715,          "lon": -73.998        },        "order":         "asc",        "unit":          "km",         "distance_type": "plane"       }    }  ]}