# Does App search support substring search?
**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/does-app-search-support-substring-search/312285
**Category:** Elastic Search
**Tags:** elastic-app-search
**Created:** [August 17, 2022, 12:47pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/does-app-search-support-substring-search/312285 "2022-08-17T12:47:52Z")
**Posts on this page:** 5
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Gerardo\_Zenobi](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Gerardo_Zenobi)
#### Post date: [August 17, 2022, 12:47pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/does-app-search-support-substring-search/312285/1 "2022-08-17T12:47:52Z")
Hi there đź‘‹
I wanted to know if App Search supported substring search ? E.g. if a user searches for “note”, this would find records with attributes containing “notepad” or “notebook”, **but it would also match “keynote”**.
For more context:
- [Find strings within strings faster with the Elasticsearch wildcard field | Elastic Blog](https://www.elastic.co/blog/find-strings-within-strings-faster-with-the-new-elasticsearch-wildcard-field)
- [Substring search in Elasticsearch - Hashnode](https://hashnode.com/post/substring-search-in-elasticsearch-ckptk60za0if2bjs1difdhn5l)
Thanks in advance.
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### Author:  [@Carlos\_D](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Carlos_D)
#### Post date: [August 17, 2022, 1:02pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/does-app-search-support-substring-search/312285/2 "2022-08-17T13:02:19Z")
Hi @Gerardo_Zenobi , nice to see you again!
App Search does not support wildcard search. It does, however, support prefix matching as part of App Search [precision tuning](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/app-search/current/precision-tuning.html).
So, in your example, you would potentially get matches for "notepad" and "notebook" for a "note" query, but you would not find matches for "keynote".
Keep in mind that there are several strategies being done under the hood in Enterprise Search:
- Prefixing
- Stemming (finding word roots, so a query for "jumping" gets results for "jump", "jumps" and "jumping")
- Delimiters removal (so "e-commerce" matches "ecommerce")
- Word joiners (so "FY 2022" would match a document with "FY2022")
These strategies are used depending on the [precision level](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/app-search/current/search-api-precision.html) for the query.
You can experiment with precision tuning for checking the results obtained for different queries in an Engine.
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### Author:  [@Gerardo\_Zenobi](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Gerardo_Zenobi)
#### Post date: [August 17, 2022, 1:26pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/does-app-search-support-substring-search/312285/3 "2022-08-17T13:26:43Z")
Hi @Carlos_D, nice to see you too 🙂
I am sorry but I think I didn't understand completely ^^
> For the query " **note**" ... you would not find matches for " **keynote**".
Wouldn't the mentioned strategy `Prefixing` help in this use case?
* * *
In general terms, then, would you say _ **substring** **search** _ is not supported then?
Thanks again
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### Author:  [@Carlos\_D](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Carlos_D)
#### Post date: [August 17, 2022, 2:42pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/does-app-search-support-substring-search/312285/4 "2022-08-17T14:42:53Z")
> Wouldn't the mentioned strategy `Prefixing` help in this use case?
I'm afraid not. You can think of prefixing as using a wildcard at the end of the query (in this case, "note\*" would not match "keynote").
> In general terms, then, would you say _ **substring** **search** _ is not supported then?
Substring search is not supported, just prefixing.
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### Author:  [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [September 14, 2022, 2:43pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/does-app-search-support-substring-search/312285/5 "2022-09-14T14:43:36Z")
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