Fuzzy Query

The fuzzy query is the fuzzy equivalent of the term query. You will seldom use it directly yourself, but understanding how it works will help you to use fuzziness in the higher-level match query.

To understand how it works, we will first index some documents:

POST /my_index/my_type/_bulk
{ "index": { "_id": 1 }}
{ "text": "Surprise me!"}
{ "index": { "_id": 2 }}
{ "text": "That was surprising."}
{ "index": { "_id": 3 }}
{ "text": "I wasn't surprised."}

Now we can run a fuzzy query for the term surprize:

GET /my_index/my_type/_search
{
  "query": {
    "fuzzy": {
      "text": "surprize"
    }
  }
}

The fuzzy query is a term-level query, so it doesn’t do any analysis. It takes a single term and finds all terms in the term dictionary that are within the specified fuzziness. The default fuzziness is AUTO.

In our example, surprize is within an edit distance of 2 from both surprise and surprised, so documents 1 and 3 match. We could reduce the matches to just surprise with the following query:

GET /my_index/my_type/_search
{
  "query": {
    "fuzzy": {
      "text": {
        "value": "surprize",
        "fuzziness": 1
      }
    }
  }
}