# How to understand the max\_expansions parameter in matchPhrasePrefixQuery? **URL:** \ **Category:** Elasticsearch\ **Created:** [April 28, 2013, 4:53am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-to-understand-the-max-expansions-parameter-in-matchphraseprefixquery/11717 "2013-04-28T04:53:47Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Jingang\_Wang](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ce7236/32.png) [@Jingang\_Wang](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Jingang_Wang)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2013, 4:53am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-to-understand-the-max-expansions-parameter-in-matchphraseprefixquery/11717/1 "2013-04-28T04:53:47Z")
HI there, I want to use matchPhrasePrefixQuery to search some person names in my indices. Because there exist some possessive cases and tokenization error. Say if I want to query documents contains "Bill Gates", some documents would contains "Bill Gates's company" or "Bill Gatesis the founder of Microsoft". I think matchPhrasePrefixQuery could resolve this problem. Therefore, I want to know how to set the parameters of matchPhraseQuery? What does max\_expansion means? Thanks very much. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "elasticsearch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [elasticsearch+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com](mailto:elasticsearch+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com). For more options, visit [https://groups.google.com/groups/opt\_out](https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out). ---
**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\ **Post date:** [July 6, 2017, 2:39am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-to-understand-the-max-expansions-parameter-in-matchphraseprefixquery/11717/2 "2017-07-06T02:39:22Z")