Choosing the right query for the job

In this section, we will start with different categories of queries available in Elasticsearch, looking at which query to use in which situation.

Query categorization

Of course, categorizing queries is a hard task and the following list of categories is not the only correct one. If you were to ask other Elasticsearch users, they would provide their own categories, or say that each query can be assigned to more than a single category, and they would be right. We also think that there is no single way of categorizing the queries; however, in our opinion, each Elasticsearch query can be assigned to one (or more) of the following categories:

• Basic queries: A category that groups queries allowing searching for a part of the index, either in an analyzed or a non-analyzed manner. The key point in this category is that you can nest queries inside a basic query. An example of a basic query is the term query.
• Compound queries: A category grouping queries that allows...