- Elasticsearch Guide: other versions:
- Getting Started
- Setup
- Breaking changes
- Breaking changes in 2.3
- Breaking changes in 2.2
- Breaking changes in 2.1
- Breaking changes in 2.0
- Removed features
- Network changes
- Multiple
path.data
striping - Mapping changes
- CRUD and routing changes
- Query DSL changes
- Search changes
- Aggregation changes
- Parent/Child changes
- Scripting changes
- Index API changes
- Snapshot and Restore changes
- Plugin and packaging changes
- Setting changes
- Stats, info, and
cat
changes - Java API changes
- API Conventions
- Document APIs
- Search APIs
- Aggregations
- Metrics Aggregations
- Avg Aggregation
- Cardinality Aggregation
- Extended Stats Aggregation
- Geo Bounds Aggregation
- Geo Centroid Aggregation
- Max Aggregation
- Min Aggregation
- Percentiles Aggregation
- Percentile Ranks Aggregation
- Scripted Metric Aggregation
- Stats Aggregation
- Sum Aggregation
- Top hits Aggregation
- Value Count Aggregation
- Bucket Aggregations
- Children Aggregation
- Date Histogram Aggregation
- Date Range Aggregation
- Filter Aggregation
- Filters Aggregation
- Geo Distance Aggregation
- GeoHash grid Aggregation
- Global Aggregation
- Histogram Aggregation
- IPv4 Range Aggregation
- Missing Aggregation
- Nested Aggregation
- Range Aggregation
- Reverse nested Aggregation
- Sampler Aggregation
- Significant Terms Aggregation
- Terms Aggregation
- Pipeline Aggregations
- Avg Bucket Aggregation
- Derivative Aggregation
- Max Bucket Aggregation
- Min Bucket Aggregation
- Sum Bucket Aggregation
- Stats Bucket Aggregation
- Extended Stats Bucket Aggregation
- Percentiles Bucket Aggregation
- Moving Average Aggregation
- Cumulative Sum Aggregation
- Bucket Script Aggregation
- Bucket Selector Aggregation
- Serial Differencing Aggregation
- Caching heavy aggregations
- Returning only aggregation results
- Aggregation Metadata
- Metrics Aggregations
- Indices APIs
- Create Index
- Delete Index
- Get Index
- Indices Exists
- Open / Close Index API
- Put Mapping
- Get Mapping
- Get Field Mapping
- Types Exists
- Index Aliases
- Update Indices Settings
- Get Settings
- Analyze
- Index Templates
- Warmers
- Shadow replica indices
- Indices Stats
- Indices Segments
- Indices Recovery
- Indices Shard Stores
- Clear Cache
- Flush
- Refresh
- Force Merge
- Optimize
- Upgrade
- cat APIs
- Cluster APIs
- Query DSL
- Mapping
- Field datatypes
- Meta-Fields
- Mapping parameters
analyzer
boost
coerce
copy_to
doc_values
dynamic
enabled
fielddata
format
geohash
geohash_precision
geohash_prefix
ignore_above
ignore_malformed
include_in_all
index
index_options
lat_lon
fields
norms
null_value
position_increment_gap
precision_step
properties
search_analyzer
similarity
store
term_vector
- Dynamic Mapping
- Transform
- Analysis
- Analyzers
- Tokenizers
- Token Filters
- Standard Token Filter
- ASCII Folding Token Filter
- Length Token Filter
- Lowercase Token Filter
- Uppercase Token Filter
- NGram Token Filter
- Edge NGram Token Filter
- Porter Stem Token Filter
- Shingle Token Filter
- Stop Token Filter
- Word Delimiter Token Filter
- Stemmer Token Filter
- Stemmer Override Token Filter
- Keyword Marker Token Filter
- Keyword Repeat Token Filter
- KStem Token Filter
- Snowball Token Filter
- Phonetic Token Filter
- Synonym Token Filter
- Compound Word Token Filter
- Reverse Token Filter
- Elision Token Filter
- Truncate Token Filter
- Unique Token Filter
- Pattern Capture Token Filter
- Pattern Replace Token Filter
- Trim Token Filter
- Limit Token Count Token Filter
- Hunspell Token Filter
- Common Grams Token Filter
- Normalization Token Filter
- CJK Width Token Filter
- CJK Bigram Token Filter
- Delimited Payload Token Filter
- Keep Words Token Filter
- Keep Types Token Filter
- Classic Token Filter
- Apostrophe Token Filter
- Decimal Digit Token Filter
- Character Filters
- Modules
- Index Modules
- Testing
- Glossary of terms
- Release Notes
- 2.3.5 Release Notes
- 2.3.4 Release Notes
- 2.3.3 Release Notes
- 2.3.2 Release Notes
- 2.3.1 Release Notes
- 2.3.0 Release Notes
- 2.2.2 Release Notes
- 2.2.1 Release Notes
- 2.2.0 Release Notes
- 2.1.2 Release Notes
- 2.1.1 Release Notes
- 2.1.0 Release Notes
- 2.0.2 Release Notes
- 2.0.1 Release Notes
- 2.0.0 Release Notes
- 2.0.0-rc1 Release Notes
- 2.0.0-beta2 Release Notes
- 2.0.0-beta1 Release Notes
WARNING: Version 2.3 of Elasticsearch has passed its EOL date.
This documentation is no longer being maintained and may be removed. If you are running this version, we strongly advise you to upgrade. For the latest information, see the current release documentation.
Search Type
editSearch Type
editThere are different execution paths that can be done when executing a distributed search. The distributed search operation needs to be scattered to all the relevant shards and then all the results are gathered back. When doing scatter/gather type execution, there are several ways to do that, specifically with search engines.
One of the questions when executing a distributed search is how many results to retrieve from each shard. For example, if we have 10 shards, the 1st shard might hold the most relevant results from 0 till 10, with other shards results ranking below it. For this reason, when executing a request, we will need to get results from 0 till 10 from all shards, sort them, and then return the results if we want to ensure correct results.
Another question, which relates to the search engine, is the fact that each shard stands on its own. When a query is executed on a specific shard, it does not take into account term frequencies and other search engine information from the other shards. If we want to support accurate ranking, we would need to first gather the term frequencies from all shards to calculate global term frequencies, then execute the query on each shard using these global frequencies.
Also, because of the need to sort the results, getting back a large
document set, or even scrolling it, while maintaining the correct sorting
behavior can be a very expensive operation. For large result set
scrolling, it is best to sort by _doc
if the order in which documents
are returned is not important.
Elasticsearch is very flexible and allows to control the type of search to execute on a per search request basis. The type can be configured by setting the search_type parameter in the query string. The types are:
Query Then Fetch
editParameter value: query_then_fetch.
The request is processed in two phases. In the first phase, the query
is forwarded to all involved shards. Each shard executes the search
and generates a sorted list of results, local to that shard. Each
shard returns just enough information to the coordinating node
to allow it merge and re-sort the shard level results into a globally
sorted set of results, of maximum length size
.
During the second phase, the coordinating node requests the document content (and highlighted snippets, if any) from only the relevant shards.
This is the default setting, if you do not specify a search_type
in your request.
Dfs, Query Then Fetch
editParameter value: dfs_query_then_fetch.
Same as "Query Then Fetch", except for an initial scatter phase which goes and computes the distributed term frequencies for more accurate scoring.
Count
editDeprecated in 2.0.0-beta1.
count
does not provide any benefits over query_then_fetch
with a size
of 0
Parameter value: count.
A special search type that returns the count that matched the search
request without any docs (represented in total_hits
), and possibly,
including aggregations as well. In general, this is preferable to the count
API as it provides more options.
Scan
editDeprecated in 2.1.0.
scan
does not provide any benefits over a regular scroll
request sorted by _doc
Parameter value: scan.
The scan
search type disables sorting in order to allow very efficient
scrolling through large result sets.
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