elasticsearchHow can I use elasticsearch fuzziness to improve my search results?

Elasticsearch fuzziness provides a way to improve search results by allowing inexact matching of search terms. Fuzziness is expressed as a value between 0 and 1, with 0 being exact match and 1 being completely fuzzy.

For example, if you have a search query for "sport car", and you want to return results that match "sports car" or "sportscar", you can use fuzziness to increase the likelihood of matching those results.

Example code

GET /_search
{
  "query": {
    "match": {
      "title": {
        "query": "sport car",
        "fuzziness": "0.5"
      }
    }
  }
}

Output example

{
  "took": 1,
  "timed_out": false,
  "_shards": {
    "total": 1,
    "successful": 1,
    "skipped": 0,
    "failed": 0
  },
  "hits": {
    "total": {
      "value": 4,
      "relation": "eq"
    },
    "max_score": 0.9808291,
    "hits": [
      {
        "_index": "my_index",
        "_type": "my_type",
        "_id": "1",
        "_score": 0.9808291,
        "_source": {
          "title": "Sports car"
        }
      },
      {
        "_index": "my_index",
        "_type": "my_type",
        "_id": "2",
        "_score": 0.9808291,
        "_source": {
          "title": "Sportscar"
        }
      },
      {
        "_index": "my_index",
        "_type": "my_type",
        "_id": "3",
        "_score": 0.8180921,
        "_source": {
          "title": "Fast car"
        }
      },
      {
        "_index": "my_index",
        "_type": "my_type",
        "_id": "4",
        "_score": 0.68203986,
        "_source": {
          "title": "Family car"
        }
      }
    ]
  }
}

Code explanation

• GET /_search: This is the endpoint used to send a search query to Elasticsearch.
• query: This is the query object that contains the search query.
• match: This is the query type used to perform a fuzzy match.
• query: This is the actual search query, in this case "sport car".
• fuzziness: This is the fuzziness value, which is set to 0.5 in this example.

Helpful links

• Elasticsearch Fuzziness Documentation
• Elasticsearch Query DSL Documentation

Edit this code on GitHub