Quotation Marks + Prioritizing Exact Matches

Elastic Search
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Hi everyone, I’m trying to use App Search to search through the text field of a bunch of documents that I indexed, and I had a few questions I was hoping someone here can help with (or point me towards a resource / documentation)

  1. It seems that quotations “” don’t do much in terms of helping me find exact matches. In fact, it’s not clear to me what their effect is on the search results. Can someone help clarify this?

  2. My use-case requires that an exact match for my query gets shown at the very top, which isn’t guaranteed with App Search e.g., let’s say I’m looking for the sentence “inflation is elevated” in the text field of my documents; if this sentence exists, the document containing it should show up on top, however, I’m getting a document that has the word inflation twice and the word elevated once (but not "inflation is elevated" in the right order) on top of the search results. Precision tuning does not do anything to help with this

PS: I have things set up in a way so I’m searching through the right text field only and ignoring other irrelevant fields.

Appreciate any insights / help! Thanks so much in advance

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Hey Christian,

I see that you got a reply in Community Slack. I'll repost it here for anyone who might read this in the future:

I think if quotes and precision tuning aren’t helping (both of which do change the resulting queries to Elasticsearch), the only other thing I can offer up within App Search is Curations. This is currently a manual process that requires promoting specific documents for specific queries. If I’m understanding your request correctly, however, it doesn’t sound like this will fit your needs.

Phrase matching is a tricky thing to get correct. If App Search’s results aren’t working for you, you may need to drop down a level and use Elasticsearch directly. I’ll be sure to ask my teammates to see if they can come up with anything more useful. Apologies I don’t have anything better at the moment.

Slack link with further discussion: Slack

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Thanks @Vadim_Yakhin. Really curious about whether there is a way for me to be able to take advantage of App Search's Lucene parser + fuzzy matching + autocomplete suggestions and still be able to search exact phrases. So far, none of the suggestions I received have worked, unfortunately!

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Hi Christian,

I don't know what factors can contribute to taking quotations into account or not. In our App Search instance both Query tester and APIcall takes quotations (double quotes " ") into account when searching.
I see the difference finding exactly one document when using a whole sentence in double quotes versus seeing multiple documents with several of the words searched for without quotes. We use App Search in the cloud, Azure, version 7.14.1.

Good luck!

Sander

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Thanks for your response, Sander. I tried using v7.12 and v7.15 and, while App Search seems to be taking into account the double quotes (" "), it's not entirely clear to me how it's doing it. Results are changing, but the hit containing an exact match still isn't coming out on top, weirdly.

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