Elasticsearch match query with partial text match

Question

Newbie question on elasticsearch. I have set up the elasticsearch lucene index and use searching for names that contain some term, such as

search_response = es.search(index = 'sample', body = {'query':{'match':{'first_name':"JUST"}}})

This does not return me the name "JUSTIN" but the following query does

search_response = es.search(index = 'sample', body = {'query':{'match':{'first_name':"JUSTIN"}}})

What am I doing wrong? Shouldn't "match" query return me the records that contain the term? Thanks.

No, match query will not get you records when you search for JUST. you can try with JUST* in wildcard query — Richa

Val Val · Accepted Answer · 2016-04-20T03:33:54

The best way to handle that need is by creating a custom analyzer which uses the edgeNGram token filter. Forget about wildcards and using * in query strings, those all underperform the edgeNGram approach.

So you'd have to create your index like this first and then reindex your data into it.

curl -XPUT http://localhost:9200/sample -d '{
    "settings": {
        "analysis": {
            "filter": {
                "prefixes": {
                    "type": "edgeNGram",
                    "min_gram": 1,
                    "max_gram": 15
                }
            },
            "analyzer": {
                "my_analyzer": {
                    "type": "custom",
                    "tokenizer": "standard",
                    "filter": ["lowercase", "prefixes"]
                }
            }
        }
    },
    "mappings": {
        "your_type": {
            "properties": {
                "first_name": {
                    "type": "string",
                    "analyzer": "my_analyzer",
                    "search_analyzer": "standard"
                }
            }
        }
    }
}'

Then when indexing first_name: JUSTIN, you'll get the following indexed tokens: j, ju, jus, just, justi, justin, basically all prefixes of JUSTIN.

You'll then be able to search with your second query and actually find what you expect.

search_response = es.search(index = 'sample', body = {'query':{'match':{'first_name':'JUST'}}})

Elasticsearch match query with partial text match

1 Answers