# Tradeoffs \_all and multiple terms

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/tradeoffs--all-and-multiple-terms/79988>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [March 25, 2017, 2:45pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/tradeoffs--all-and-multiple-terms/79988 "2017-03-25T14:45:08Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Isaias\_Barroso](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/isaias_barroso/32/3980_2.png) [@Isaias\_Barroso](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Isaias_Barroso)\
**Post date:** [March 25, 2017, 2:45pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/tradeoffs--all-and-multiple-terms/79988/1 "2017-03-25T14:45:08Z")

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Hi all.

I've a use case where I need to use a free search, so I need to search on all fields. I know that have some important information about \_all in the documentation:

"The \_all field can be useful, especially when exploring new data using simple filtering. However, by concatenating field values into one big string, the \_all field loses the distinction between short fields (more relevant) and long fields (less relevant). For use cases where search relevance is important, it is better to query individual fields specifically."

In my use case, I have control about all mappings (Dynamic mapping is not allowed) so I could search for all fields using multiple terms. So, I'm thinking about tradeoffs in doing a search for all terms (about 30 fields) or is better to use the \_all. I need to use n-gram because I assume some typos on texts that will be indexed.

Does someone have some reference to get more details about it ou someone already used that approach? I'm searching for some opinion before start a Proof of Concept for that.  
I want to discovery if the cost (CPU, memory, disk) of use \_all analyzed as n-gram will be better or worse than searching on all fields.

Thanks a lot

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**Author:** ![Isaias\_Barroso](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/isaias_barroso/32/3980_2.png) [@Isaias\_Barroso](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Isaias_Barroso)\
**Post date:** [March 27, 2017, 1:42pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/tradeoffs--all-and-multiple-terms/79988/2 "2017-03-27T13:42:49Z")

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Hi.

I got my answer on that presentation [https://www.elastic.co/elasticon/conf/2017/sf/elasticsearch-search-improvements](https://www.elastic.co/elasticon/conf/2017/sf/elasticsearch-search-improvements)

Thanks

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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:** [April 24, 2017, 1:42pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/tradeoffs--all-and-multiple-terms/79988/3 "2017-04-24T13:42:54Z")

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Closed on April 24, 2017, 1:42pm UTC

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