Explaining a query
When executing searches, it's very common to have documents that don't match the query as expected. To easily debug these scenarios, Elasticsearch provides the explain query call, which allows you to check how the scores are computed against a document.
Getting ready
You need an up-and-running Elasticsearch installation, as we described in the Downloading and installing Elasticsearch recipe in Chapter 1, Getting Started.
To execute these commands, any HTTP client can be used, such as curl (https://curl.haxx.se/), postman (https://www.getpostman.com/), or similar. I suggest using the Kibana console as it provides code completion and better character escaping for Elasticsearch.
To correctly execute the following commands, you will need an index populated with the ch04/populate_kibana.txt commands, which is available in the online code.
How to do it...
The steps that are required to execute the explain query call are as follows:
- From the command line, we will execute an explain...
