Thanks for the write-up.
One approach for more transparency into what search terms matched might be to use the highlighter that ships with the annotated_text field which is installed as an extra plugin. Although it's designed for use on annotated_text
fields it also works with text
fields and uses a markdown-like syntax for adding annotations to text e.g. given this doc:
{
"text": "The new hot technology has emerged!"
}
and this query
{
"query": {
"bool": {
"should": [
{"match": {"text": "fabulous"}},
{"match": {"text": "new"}}
],
"must": [
{"match": {"text": "technology"}},
{"wildcard": {"text": "emerg*"}}
]
}
},
"highlight": {
"type": "annotated",
"fields": {
"text": {}
}
}
}
The marked-up result includes which terms matched a section of text:
"highlight": {
"text": [
"The [new](_hit_term=new) hot [technology](_hit_term=technology) has [emerged](_hit_term=text%3Aemerg*)!"
]
}