Highlighting results

Elasticsearch performs a good job of finding matching results in big text documents. It's useful for searching text in very large blocks, but to improve user experience, you need to show users the abstract—a small portion of the text part of the document that has matched the query. The abstract is a common way to help users understand how the matched document is relevant to them.

The highlight functionality in Elasticsearch is designed to do this job.

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...