Using span queries

The big difference between standard databases (SQL and also many NoSQL databases) and Elasticsearch is the number of facilities used to express text queries. The span query family is a group of queries that controls a sequence of text tokens using their positions: standard queries don't take care of the positional presence of text tokens.

Span queries allow you to define several kinds of queries:

• The exact phrase query.
• The exact fragment query (that is, take off and give up).
• Partial exact phrase with a slop (other tokens between the searched terms, that is, the man with slop 2 can also match the strong man, the old wise man, and more).

Getting ready

You will need an up-and-running Elasticsearch installation, as described in the Downloading and installing Elasticsearch recipe of Chapter 1, Getting Started.

To execute the commands, any HTTP client can be used, such as Curl (https://curl.haxx.se/), Postman (https...