Finding an exact phrase in multiple fields with Elasticsearch

Question

I'm wanting to find an exact phrase (for instance, "the quick brown fox") across mutliple fields in a document.

Right now, I'm using something like this:

{
  "query": {
    "filtered": {
      "query": {
        "multi_match": {
          "fields": [
            "subject",
            "comments"
          ],
          "query": "the quick brown fox"
        }
      },
      "filters": {
        "and": [
          {
            "term": {
              "priority": "high"
            }
          }
          ...more ands
        ]
      }
    }
  }
}

Question is, how can I do this correctly. Right now I'm getting the best match first, which tends to be the entire phrase, but I'm getting a load of almost matches too.

ThomasC · Accepted Answer · 2014-08-21 21:57:42Z

2

If you are using an ElasticSearch cluster with version >= 1.1.0, you could set the mode of your multi-match query to phrase :

...
  "query": {
    "multi_match": {
      "fields": [
        "subject",
        "comments"
      ],
      "query": "the quick brown fox",
      "type": "phrase"
    }
...

It will replace the match query generated for each field by a match_phrase one, which will return only the documents containing the full phrase (you can find details in the documentation)

edited Aug 21, 2014 at 21:57

answered Aug 21, 2014 at 21:39

ThomasC

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Comments

coffeeaddict · Accepted Answer · 2014-08-22 06:49:41Z

0

how are you analyzing the subject/comments fields? if you want exact match, you'll need to use the keyword tokenizer for both index/search.

answered Aug 22, 2014 at 6:49

coffeeaddict

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