Question

I’ve recently started using ElasticSearch and I can’t seem to make it search for a part of a word.

Example: I have three documents from my couchdb indexed in ElasticSearch:

{
  "_id" : "1",
  "name" : "John Doeman",
  "function" : "Janitor"
}
{
  "_id" : "2",
  "name" : "Jane Doewoman",
  "function" : "Teacher"
}
{
  "_id" : "3",
  "name" : "Jimmy Jackal",
  "function" : "Student"
} 

So now, I want to search for all documents containing “Doe”

curl http://localhost:9200/my_idx/my_type/_search?q=Doe

That doesn’t return any hits. But if I search for

curl http://localhost:9200/my_idx/my_type/_search?q=Doeman

It does return one document (John Doeman).

I’ve tried setting different analyzers and different filters as properties of my index. I’ve also tried using a full blown query (for example:

{
  "query": {
    "term": {
      "name": "Doe"
    }
  }
}

)
But nothing seems to work.

How can I make ElasticSearch find both John Doeman and Jane Doewoman when I search for “Doe” ?

UPDATE

I tried to use the nGram tokenizer and filter, like Igor proposed, like this:

{
  "index": {
    "index": "my_idx",
    "type": "my_type",
    "bulk_size": "100",
    "bulk_timeout": "10ms",
    "analysis": {
      "analyzer": {
        "my_analyzer": {
          "type": "custom",
          "tokenizer": "my_ngram_tokenizer",
          "filter": [
            "my_ngram_filter"
          ]
        }
      },
      "filter": {
        "my_ngram_filter": {
          "type": "nGram",
          "min_gram": 1,
          "max_gram": 1
        }
      },
      "tokenizer": {
        "my_ngram_tokenizer": {
          "type": "nGram",
          "min_gram": 1,
          "max_gram": 1
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

The problem I’m having now is that each and every query returns ALL documents.
Any pointers? ElasticSearch documentation on using nGram isn’t great…

Answer 1

I’m using nGram, too. I use standard tokenizer and nGram just as a filter. Here is my setup:

{
  "index": {
    "index": "my_idx",
    "type": "my_type",
    "analysis": {
      "index_analyzer": {
        "my_index_analyzer": {
          "type": "custom",
          "tokenizer": "standard",
          "filter": [
            "lowercase",
            "mynGram"
          ]
        }
      },
      "search_analyzer": {
        "my_search_analyzer": {
          "type": "custom",
          "tokenizer": "standard",
          "filter": [
            "standard",
            "lowercase",
            "mynGram"
          ]
        }
      },
      "filter": {
        "mynGram": {
          "type": "nGram",
          "min_gram": 2,
          "max_gram": 50
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Let’s you find word parts up to 50 letters. Adjust the max_gram as you need. In german words can get really big, so I set it to a high value.