Substituting Match Phrase Prefix Query with a MUST combination of Match Phrase and Prefix

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

Hi,

I am using match phrase prefix for suggestion and querying search result. I'm using this for searching employee name, skill name, etc... basically name / title field which is not long.
When I'm searching name like "john d", I'm expecting results such as ["John Doe", "John Dwayne McKinsey", ...] but no results due to the limitation of max_expansions.

Match phrase prefix is as the name suggest, the combination of match phrase and prefix. Hence I'm wondering if I can substitute the query with below snippet.
2 words - 'john d'

{
  query: {
    bool: {
      must: [
        {
          match_phrase: { name: 'john' },
        },
        {
          prefix: { name: 'd' },
        }
      ]
    }
  }
}

3 words - 'john dwayne m'

{
  query: {
    bool: {
      must: [
        {
          match_phrase: { name: 'john dwayne' },
        },
        {
          prefix: { name: 'm' },
        }
      ]
    }
  }
}

or if there's only one word, only prefix is used

{
  query: {
    bool: {
      must: [
        {
          prefix: { name: 'joh' },
        }
      ]
    }
  }
}

I need opinion on above substitute query and whether it will have hidden issue or not?

To note:
This works on my case where the terms/words order is somewhat unimportant. As far as I observe, the response time between match_phrase_prefix and above query are no different.

Thank you

1 Like
2

Hi @aliyanamu,

Welcome to the community! From the documentation the last term of the provided text is treated as a prefix. So your examples above would behave equivalently.

Have you tried running your queries through the Search Profiler to look at the differences?

1 Like
3

This topic was automatically closed 28 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.