Phrase Search

Finding individual words in a field is all well and good, but sometimes you want to match exact sequences of words or phrases. For instance, we could perform a query that will match only employee records that contain both “rock” and “climbing” and that display the words next to each other in the phrase “rock climbing.”

To do this, we use a slight variation of the match query called the match_phrase query:

GET /megacorp/employee/_search
{
    "query" : {
        "match_phrase" : {
            "about" : "rock climbing"
        }
    }
}

This, to no surprise, returns only John Smith’s document:

{
   ...
   "hits": {
      "total":      1,
      "max_score":  0.23013961,
      "hits": [
         {
            ...
            "_score":         0.23013961,
            "_source": {
               "first_name":  "John",
               "last_name":   "Smith",
               "age":         25,
               "about":       "I love to go rock climbing",
               "interests": [ "sports", "music" ]
            }
         }
      ]
   }
}