title: Is it possible to retrieve only doc id and score from Elasticsearch without performing the fetch phase of search?
body: <p><a href="https://www.elastic.co/blog/understanding-query-then-fetch-vs-dfs-query-then-fetch" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Understanding &quot;Query Then Fetch&quot;</a> shows that an Elasticsearch query is a two step process of query (find/score/sort matching documents from all servers) and fetching (go back to the servers and collect the content of the matching documents).</p>
  <p>Is there a way to retrieve only a list of sorted doc_id and score but avoid the fetch? I know that fetch can be avoided by setting size to 0... but I still need the matching docs and their scores and that would return none.</p>
  <p>I figure I <em>might</em> be able to turn off _source, but I'm not sure that would work if, for example, the query portion of the search only knows the internal doc_id and needs to go and retrieve the public doc_id.</p>