Inverted Indexedit

Elasticsearch uses a structure called an inverted index, which is designed to allow very fast full-text searches. An inverted index consists of a list of all the unique words that appear in any document, and for each word, a list of the documents in which it appears.

For example, let’s say we have two documents, each with a content field containing the following:

  1. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog
  2. Quick brown foxes leap over lazy dogs in summer

To create an inverted index, we first split the content field of each document into separate words (which we call terms, or tokens), create a sorted list of all the unique terms, and then list in which document each term appears. The result looks something like this:

Term      Doc_1  Doc_2
-------------------------
Quick   |       |  X
The     |   X   |
brown   |   X   |  X
dog     |   X   |
dogs    |       |  X
fox     |   X   |
foxes   |       |  X
in      |       |  X
jumped  |   X   |
lazy    |   X   |  X
leap    |       |  X
over    |   X   |  X
quick   |   X   |
summer  |       |  X
the     |   X   |
------------------------

Now, if we want to search for quick brown, we just need to find the documents in which each term appears:

Term      Doc_1  Doc_2
-------------------------
brown   |   X   |  X
quick   |   X   |
------------------------
Total   |   2   |  1

Both documents match, but the first document has more matches than the second. If we apply a naive similarity algorithm that just counts the number of matching terms, then we can say that the first document is a better match—​is more relevant to our query—​than the second document.

But there are a few problems with our current inverted index:

  • Quick and quick appear as separate terms, while the user probably thinks of them as the same word.
  • fox and foxes are pretty similar, as are dog and dogs; They share the same root word.
  • jumped and leap, while not from the same root word, are similar in meaning. They are synonyms.

With the preceding index, a search for +Quick +fox wouldn’t match any documents. (Remember, a preceding + means that the word must be present.) Both the term Quick and the term fox have to be in the same document in order to satisfy the query, but the first doc contains quick fox and the second doc contains Quick foxes.

Our user could reasonably expect both documents to match the query. We can do better.

If we normalize the terms into a standard format, then we can find documents that contain terms that are not exactly the same as the user requested, but are similar enough to still be relevant. For instance:

  • Quick can be lowercased to become quick.
  • foxes can be stemmed--reduced to its root form—​to become fox. Similarly, dogs could be stemmed to dog.
  • jumped and leap are synonyms and can be indexed as just the single term jump.

Now the index looks like this:

Term      Doc_1  Doc_2
-------------------------
brown   |   X   |  X
dog     |   X   |  X
fox     |   X   |  X
in      |       |  X
jump    |   X   |  X
lazy    |   X   |  X
over    |   X   |  X
quick   |   X   |  X
summer  |       |  X
the     |   X   |  X
------------------------

But we’re not there yet. Our search for +Quick +fox would still fail, because we no longer have the exact term Quick in our index. However, if we apply the same normalization rules that we used on the content field to our query string, it would become a query for +quick +fox, which would match both documents!

This is very important. You can find only terms that exist in your index, so both the indexed text and the query string must be normalized into the same form.

This process of tokenization and normalization is called analysis, which we discuss in the next section.