How should I query Elastic Search given my mapping and using keywords?

Question

I have a very simple mapping which looks like this (I streamlined the example a bit):

{
    "location" : {
        "properties": {
            "name": { "type": "string", "boost": 2.0, "analyzer": "snowball" },
            "description": { "type": "string", "analyzer": "snowball" }
        }
    }
}

Now I index a lot of locations using some random values which are based on real English words.

I'd like to be able to search for locations that match any of the given keywords in either the name or the description field (name is more important, hence the boost I gave it). I tried a few different queries and they don't return any results.

{
    "fields" : ["name", "description"],
    "query" : {
        "terms" : {
            "name" : ["savage"],
            "description" : ["savage"]
        },
        "from" : 0,
        "size" : 500
    }
}

Considering there are locations which have the word savaged in the description it should get me some results (savage is the stem of savaged). It yields 0 results using the above query. I've been using curl to query ES:

curl -XGET -d @query.json http://localhost:9200/myindex/locations/_search

If I use query string instead:

curl -XGET http://localhost:9200/fieldtripfinder/locations/_search?q=description:savage

I actually get one result (of course now it would be searching the description field only).

Basically I am looking for a query that will do a OR kind of search using multiple keywords and compare them to the values in both the name and the description field.

Answer 1

Snowball stems "savage" into "savag" that’s why term "savage" didn't return any results. However, when you specify "savage" on URL, it’s getting analyzed and you get results. Depending on what your intention is, you can either use correct stem ("savag") or analyze your terms by using "match" query instead of "terms":

{
  "fields" : ["name", "description"],
  "query" : {
    "bool" : {
      "should" : [
        {"match" : {"name" : "savage"}},
        {"match" : {"description" : "savage"}}
      ]
    },
    "from" : 0,
    "size" : 500
  }
}