# Is there a kind of query/rescore/similarity magic that lets me know if all the terms in a field are matched?

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/is-there-a-kind-of-query-rescore-similarity-magic-that-lets-me-know-if-all-the-terms-in-a-field-are-matched/15176>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [January 9, 2014, 4:18pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/is-there-a-kind-of-query-rescore-similarity-magic-that-lets-me-know-if-all-the-terms-in-a-field-are-matched/15176 "2014-01-09T16:18:50Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![nik9000](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/nik9000/32/44947_2.png) [@nik9000](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/nik9000)\
**Post date:** [January 9, 2014, 4:18pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/is-there-a-kind-of-query-rescore-similarity-magic-that-lets-me-know-if-all-the-terms-in-a-field-are-matched/15176/1 "2014-01-09T16:18:50Z")

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I'm looking to boost matches that where all the terms in the field match  
more than I'm getting out of the default similarity. Is there some way to  
ask Elasticsearch to do that? I'm ok with only checking in some small  
window of top documents or really anything other than a large performance  
hit. To be honest I haven't played too much with similarities so maybe  
what I want is there.

Thanks!

Nik

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**Author:** ![brian\_yoder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/f1d935/32.png) [@brian\_yoder](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/brian_yoder)\
**Post date:** [January 9, 2014, 4:42pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/is-there-a-kind-of-query-rescore-similarity-magic-that-lets-me-know-if-all-the-terms-in-a-field-are-matched/15176/2 "2014-01-09T16:42:09Z")

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Nik,

No, there is not.

There's a work-around in which the number of terms in a field can be stored  
in another field during indexing time. And then you can analyze your query  
string to count the number of terms, and then use that count to match  
against the documents that have the same count. But consider the following  
field:

"text" : "Very Big Dog"

Three terms in the field's value, right?

And consider the query:

"+text:very +text:very +text:very"

As in:

{  
"bool" : {  
"must" : [ {  
"match" : {  
"text" : {  
"query" : "very",  
"type" : "boolean"  
}  
}  
}, {  
"match" : {  
"text" : {  
"query" : "very",  
"type" : "boolean"  
}  
}  
}, {  
"match" : {  
"text" : {  
"query" : "very",  
"type" : "boolean"  
}  
}  
} ]  
}  
}

Three query terms, right?

But it will match the field, and the term counts will match, and therefore  
you will then be told that _Very Very Very_ is a perfect match for _Very  
Big Dog_.

Oops!

This is a Lucene limitation. Probably not a really big deal; I only know of  
two search engines that can properly handle duplicate terms: Google's, and  
the one I wrote in my previous life. But it is something that would be a  
very nice and useful feature for Lucene. Since Lucene already knows the  
word positions, it can verify that each term matches a unique word position  
(which is what I did in mine).

Brian

On Thursday, January 9, 2014 11:18:50 AM UTC-5, Nikolas Everett wrote:

> I'm looking to boost matches that where all the terms in the field match  
> more than I'm getting out of the default similarity. Is there some way to  
> ask Elasticsearch to do that? I'm ok with only checking in some small  
> window of top documents or really anything other than a large performance  
> hit. To be honest I haven't played too much with similarities so maybe  
> what I want is there.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Nik

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**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, 1:57am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/is-there-a-kind-of-query-rescore-similarity-magic-that-lets-me-know-if-all-the-terms-in-a-field-are-matched/15176/3 "2017-07-06T01:57:39Z")

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