Question

When searching some documents using elasticsearch, I’d like to see which field in the document was the “hit” that flagged it up as a search result. Is there a native way to do this, or do I need to do it in the search client?

E.g:

GET /events/_search?q=nottingham

gives me:

{//elided
    {'hits'[
       {'id':1,
        'name': 'Some name',
        'nicknames': ['Nottingham']
       }]}}

it’s obvious from this example that the nickname matched, but can I get elasticsearch to flag that for me?

Answer 1

Elasticsearch can find and highlight terms from your query in the result fields. See http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/reference/api/search/highlighting.html for more information. Technically speaking, it’s not the same as flagging fields that caused the “hit”, but for most practical purposes, it’s as useful.