Elasticsearch has implemented several optimizations to enhance the speed of sort queries, particularly for numeric and date fields, to improve user experience. By leveraging techniques like index sorting, which arranges the entire index by a specific field, and introducing the distance_feature query, Elasticsearch can efficiently skip non-competitive blocks of documents, leading to significant performance gains. The search_after parameter has been optimized to allow faster sorting across multiple segments by using comparators and collectors within Lucene, which resulted in up to a 10x speed increase in some benchmarks. Additionally, optimizations have been made for sorting across multiple shards by pre-sorting them based on the primary sort field's max/min value, allowing for a more efficient distributed search. These enhancements have been particularly beneficial for time series indices and help ensure that users can achieve faster query responses when they do not need to track the exact total number of hits. Elastic Cloud users can access these features directly, and recent changes in Kibana have further accelerated sort queries by disabling total hit tracking.