How can I boost certain fields over others in elasticsearch? - boost

Question

My goal is to apply the boost to field "name" (see example below), but I have two problems when I search for "john":
search is also matching {name: "dany", message: "hi bob"} when name is "dany" and
search is not boosting name over message (rows with name="john" should be on the top)
The gist is on https://gist.github.com/tomaspet262/5535774
(since stackoverflow's form submit returned 'Your post appears to contain code that is not properly formatted as code', which was formatted properly).

Answer 1

I would suggest using query time boosting instead of index time boosting.
#DELETE
curl -XDELETE 'http://localhost:9200/test'
echo
# CREATE
curl -XPUT 'http://localhost:9200/test?pretty=1' -d '{
"settings": {
"analysis" : {
"analyzer" : {
"my_analyz_1" : {
"filter" : [
"standard",
"lowercase",
"asciifolding"
],
"type" : "custom",
"tokenizer" : "standard"
}
}
}
}
}'
echo
# DEFINE
curl -XPUT 'http://localhost:9200/test/posts/_mapping?pretty=1' -d '{
"posts" : {
"properties" : {
"name" : {
"type" : "string",
"analyzer" : "my_analyz_1"
},
"message" : {
"type" : "string",
"analyzer" : "my_analyz_1"
}
}
}
}'
echo
# INSERT
curl localhost:9200/test/posts/1 -d '{name: "john", message: "hi john"}'
curl localhost:9200/test/posts/2 -d '{name: "bob", message: "hi john, how are you?"}'
curl localhost:9200/test/posts/3 -d '{name: "john", message: "bob?"}'
curl localhost:9200/test/posts/4 -d '{name: "dany", message: "hi bob"}'
curl localhost:9200/test/posts/5 -d '{name: "dany", message: "hi john"}'
echo
# REFRESH
curl -XPOST localhost:9200/test/_refresh
echo
# SEARCH
curl "localhost:9200/test/posts/_search?pretty=1" -d '{
"query": {
"multi_match": {
"query": "john",
"fields": ["name^2", "message"]
}
}
}'

Answer 2

Im not sure if this is relevant in this case, but when testing with such small amounts of data, I always use 1 shard instead of default settings to ensure no issues because of distributed calculation.