# Options for increasing precision

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/options-for-increasing-precision/219920>\
**Category:** Elastic Search\
**Tags:** elastic-app-search\
**Created:** [February 19, 2020, 8:27am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/options-for-increasing-precision/219920 "2020-02-19T08:27:27Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 5

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**Author:** ![Mark\_Harwood](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/mark_harwood/32/10538_2.png) [@Mark\_Harwood](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Mark_Harwood)\
**Post date:** [August 10, 2020, 8:41am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/options-for-increasing-precision/219920/5 "2020-08-10T08:41:02Z")

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> [@rathcke](#):
>
> We have a use-case where we'd like to increase precision.

I recently came across a quirk that can help increase precision. It's a side effect of this suggestion:

> [@JasonStoltz](#):
>
> You could also try crafting a more specific query with Lucene Query Syntax

The query doesn't necessarily need to be "more specific". Introducing _any_ Boolean operator (AND, OR etc) changes the matching mode app search uses. Without Boolean operators, search terms are chopped into parts ("ngrams") so that `dress` effectively searches for `dress OR dre OR ess`. This form of fuzzy matching should rank dress or dresses highest but will also match words like `mattress`.  
As soon as you introduce a Boolean operator of any kind app-search switches mode and searches for exact words only, not parts of words. The example searches below would only match documents with the word dress and not mattr **ess** :

```
dress AND dress
dress OR dress
dress NOT wordThatDoesNotExist
dress OR wordThatDoesNotExist
"dress"

```

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