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Match Query
editMatch Query
editA family of match
queries that accepts text/numerics/dates, analyzes
them, and constructs a query. For example:
{ "match" : { "message" : "this is a test" } }
Note, message
is the name of a field, you can substitute the name of
any field (including _all
) instead.
Types of Match Queries
editboolean
editThe default match
query is of type boolean
. It means that the text
provided is analyzed and the analysis process constructs a boolean query
from the provided text. The operator
flag can be set to or
or and
to control the boolean clauses (defaults to or
). The minimum number of
optional should
clauses to match can be set using the
minimum_should_match
parameter.
The analyzer
can be set to control which analyzer will perform the
analysis process on the text. It defaults to the field explicit mapping
definition, or the default search analyzer.
fuzziness
allows fuzzy matching based on the type of field being queried.
See Fuzziness for allowed settings.
The prefix_length
and
max_expansions
can be set in this case to control the fuzzy process.
If the fuzzy option is set the query will use constant_score_rewrite
as its rewrite
method the fuzzy_rewrite
parameter allows to control how the query will get
rewritten.
Here is an example when providing additional parameters (note the slight
change in structure, message
is the field name):
{ "match" : { "message" : { "query" : "this is a test", "operator" : "and" } } }
zero_terms_queryIf the analyzer used removes all tokens in a query like a stop
filter
does, the default behavior is to match no documents at all. In order to
change that the zero_terms_query
option can be used, which accepts
none
(default) and all
which corresponds to a match_all
query.
{ "match" : { "message" : { "query" : "to be or not to be", "operator" : "and", "zero_terms_query": "all" } } }
cutoff_frequencyThe match query supports a cutoff_frequency
that allows
specifying an absolute or relative document frequency where high
frequency terms are moved into an optional subquery and are only scored
if one of the low frequency (below the cutoff) terms in the case of an
or
operator or all of the low frequency terms in the case of an and
operator match.
This query allows handling stopwords
dynamically at runtime, is domain
independent and doesn’t require a stopword file. It prevents scoring /
iterating high frequency terms and only takes the terms into account if a
more significant / lower frequency term matches a document. Yet, if all
of the query terms are above the given cutoff_frequency
the query is
automatically transformed into a pure conjunction (and
) query to
ensure fast execution.
The cutoff_frequency
can either be relative to the total number of
documents if in the range [0..1)
or absolute if greater or equal to
1.0
.
Here is an example showing a query composed of stopwords exclusively:
{ "match" : { "message" : { "query" : "to be or not to be", "cutoff_frequency" : 0.001 } } }
The cutoff_frequency
option operates on a per-shard-level. This means
that when trying it out on test indexes with low document numbers you
should follow the advice in Relevance is broken.
phrase
editThe match_phrase
query analyzes the text and creates a phrase
query
out of the analyzed text. For example:
{ "match_phrase" : { "message" : "this is a test" } }
Since match_phrase
is only a type
of a match
query, it can also be
used in the following manner:
{ "match" : { "message" : { "query" : "this is a test", "type" : "phrase" } } }
A phrase query matches terms up to a configurable slop
(which defaults to 0) in any order. Transposed terms have a slop of 2.
The analyzer
can be set to control which analyzer will perform the
analysis process on the text. It defaults to the field explicit mapping
definition, or the default search analyzer, for example:
{ "match_phrase" : { "message" : { "query" : "this is a test", "analyzer" : "my_analyzer" } } }
match_phrase_prefix
editThe match_phrase_prefix
is the same as match_phrase
, except that it
allows for prefix matches on the last term in the text. For example:
{ "match_phrase_prefix" : { "message" : "this is a test" } }
Or:
{ "match" : { "message" : { "query" : "this is a test", "type" : "phrase_prefix" } } }
It accepts the same parameters as the phrase type. In addition, it also
accepts a max_expansions
parameter that can control to how many
prefixes the last term will be expanded. It is highly recommended to set
it to an acceptable value to control the execution time of the query.
For example:
{ "match_phrase_prefix" : { "message" : { "query" : "this is a test", "max_expansions" : 10 } } }
Comparison to query_string / field
editThe match family of queries does not go through a "query parsing"
process. It does not support field name prefixes, wildcard characters,
or other "advanced" features. For this reason, chances of it failing are
very small / non existent, and it provides an excellent behavior when it
comes to just analyze and run that text as a query behavior (which is
usually what a text search box does). Also, the phrase_prefix
type can
provide a great "as you type" behavior to automatically load search
results.
Other options
edit-
lenient
- If set to true will cause format based failures (like providing text to a numeric field) to be ignored. Defaults to false.