Completion Suggester
editCompletion Suggester
editIn order to understand the format of suggestions, please read the Suggesters page first.
The completion
suggester provides auto-complete/search-as-you-type
functionality. This is a navigational feature to guide users to
relevant results as they are typing, improving search precision.
It is not meant for spell correction or did-you-mean functionality
like the term
or phrase
suggesters.
Ideally, auto-complete functionality should be as fast as a user
types to provide instant feedback relevant to what a user has already
typed in. Hence, completion
suggester is optimized for speed.
The suggester uses data structures that enable fast lookups,
but are costly to build and are stored in-memory.
Mapping
editTo use this feature, specify a special mapping for this field, which indexes the field values for fast completions.
PUT music { "mappings": { "_doc" : { "properties" : { "suggest" : { "type" : "completion" }, "title" : { "type": "keyword" } } } } }
Mapping supports the following parameters:
-
analyzer
-
The index analyzer to use, defaults to
simple
. In case you are wondering why we did not opt for thestandard
analyzer: We try to have easy to understand behaviour here, and if you index the field contentAt the Drive-in
, you will not get any suggestions fora
, nor ford
(the first non stopword). -
search_analyzer
-
The search analyzer to use, defaults to value of
analyzer
. -
preserve_separators
-
Preserves the separators, defaults to
true
. If disabled, you could find a field starting withFoo Fighters
, if you suggest forfoof
. -
preserve_position_increments
-
Enables position increments, defaults to
true
. If disabled and using stopwords analyzer, you could get a field starting withThe Beatles
, if you suggest forb
. Note: You could also achieve this by indexing two inputs,Beatles
andThe Beatles
, no need to change a simple analyzer, if you are able to enrich your data. -
max_input_length
-
Limits the length of a single input, defaults to
50
UTF-16 code points. This limit is only used at index time to reduce the total number of characters per input string in order to prevent massive inputs from bloating the underlying datastructure. Most usecases won’t be influenced by the default value since prefix completions seldom grow beyond prefixes longer than a handful of characters.
Indexing
editYou index suggestions like any other field. A suggestion is made of an
input
and an optional weight
attribute. An input
is the expected
text to be matched by a suggestion query and the weight
determines how
the suggestions will be scored. Indexing a suggestion is as follows:
PUT music/_doc/1?refresh { "suggest" : { "input": [ "Nevermind", "Nirvana" ], "weight" : 34 } }
The following parameters are supported:
-
input
- The input to store, this can be an array of strings or just a string. This field is mandatory.
-
weight
- A positive integer or a string containing a positive integer, which defines a weight and allows you to rank your suggestions. This field is optional.
You can index multiple suggestions for a document as follows:
PUT music/_doc/1?refresh { "suggest" : [ { "input": "Nevermind", "weight" : 10 }, { "input": "Nirvana", "weight" : 3 } ] }
You can use the following shorthand form. Note that you can not specify a weight with suggestion(s) in the shorthand form.
PUT music/_doc/1?refresh { "suggest" : [ "Nevermind", "Nirvana" ] }
Querying
editSuggesting works as usual, except that you have to specify the suggest
type as completion
. Suggestions are near real-time, which means
new suggestions can be made visible by refresh and
documents once deleted are never shown. This request:
POST music/_search?pretty { "suggest": { "song-suggest" : { "prefix" : "nir", "completion" : { "field" : "suggest" } } } }
Prefix used to search for suggestions |
|
Type of suggestions |
|
Name of the field to search for suggestions in |
returns this response:
{ "_shards" : { "total" : 5, "successful" : 5, "skipped" : 0, "failed" : 0 }, "hits": ... "took": 2, "timed_out": false, "suggest": { "song-suggest" : [ { "text" : "nir", "offset" : 0, "length" : 3, "options" : [ { "text" : "Nirvana", "_index": "music", "_type": "_doc", "_id": "1", "_score": 1.0, "_source": { "suggest": ["Nevermind", "Nirvana"] } } ] } ] } }
_source
meta-field must be enabled, which is the default
behavior, to enable returning _source
with suggestions.
The configured weight for a suggestion is returned as _score
. The
text
field uses the input
of your indexed suggestion. Suggestions
return the full document _source
by default. The size of the _source
can impact performance due to disk fetch and network transport overhead.
To save some network overhead, filter out unnecessary fields from the _source
using source filtering to minimize
_source
size. Note that the _suggest endpoint doesn’t support source
filtering but using suggest on the _search
endpoint does:
POST music/_search { "_source": "suggest", "suggest": { "song-suggest" : { "prefix" : "nir", "completion" : { "field" : "suggest", "size" : 5 } } } }
Filter the source to return only the |
|
Name of the field to search for suggestions in |
|
Number of suggestions to return |
Which should look like:
{ "took": 6, "timed_out": false, "_shards" : { "total" : 5, "successful" : 5, "skipped" : 0, "failed" : 0 }, "hits": { "total" : 0, "max_score" : 0.0, "hits" : [] }, "suggest": { "song-suggest" : [ { "text" : "nir", "offset" : 0, "length" : 3, "options" : [ { "text" : "Nirvana", "_index": "music", "_type": "_doc", "_id": "1", "_score": 1.0, "_source": { "suggest": ["Nevermind", "Nirvana"] } } ] } ] } }
The basic completion suggester query supports the following parameters:
-
field
- The name of the field on which to run the query (required).
-
size
-
The number of suggestions to return (defaults to
5
). -
skip_duplicates
-
Whether duplicate suggestions should be filtered out (defaults to
false
).
The completion suggester considers all documents in the index. See Context Suggester for an explanation of how to query a subset of documents instead.
In case of completion queries spanning more than one shard, the suggest is executed in two phases, where the last phase fetches the relevant documents from shards, implying executing completion requests against a single shard is more performant due to the document fetch overhead when the suggest spans multiple shards. To get best performance for completions, it is recommended to index completions into a single shard index. In case of high heap usage due to shard size, it is still recommended to break index into multiple shards instead of optimizing for completion performance.
Skip duplicate suggestions
editQueries can return duplicate suggestions coming from different documents.
It is possible to modify this behavior by setting skip_duplicates
to true.
When set, this option filters out documents with duplicate suggestions from the result.
POST music/_search?pretty { "suggest": { "song-suggest" : { "prefix" : "nor", "completion" : { "field" : "suggest", "skip_duplicates": true } } } }
when set to true this option can slow down search because more suggestions need to be visited to find the top N.
Fuzzy queries
editThe completion suggester also supports fuzzy queries - this means, you can have a typo in your search and still get results back.
POST music/_search?pretty { "suggest": { "song-suggest" : { "prefix" : "nor", "completion" : { "field" : "suggest", "fuzzy" : { "fuzziness" : 2 } } } } }
Suggestions that share the longest prefix to the query prefix
will
be scored higher.
The fuzzy query can take specific fuzzy parameters. The following parameters are supported:
|
The fuzziness factor, defaults to |
|
if set to |
|
Minimum length of the input before fuzzy
suggestions are returned, defaults |
|
Minimum length of the input, which is not
checked for fuzzy alternatives, defaults to |
|
If |
If you want to stick with the default values, but
still use fuzzy, you can either use fuzzy: {}
or fuzzy: true
.
Regex queries
editThe completion suggester also supports regex queries meaning you can express a prefix as a regular expression
POST music/_search?pretty { "suggest": { "song-suggest" : { "regex" : "n[ever|i]r", "completion" : { "field" : "suggest" } } } }
The regex query can take specific regex parameters. The following parameters are supported:
|
Possible flags are |
|
Regular expressions are dangerous because it’s easy to accidentally
create an innocuous looking one that requires an exponential number of
internal determinized automaton states (and corresponding RAM and CPU)
for Lucene to execute. Lucene prevents these using the
|