Using span queries

The big difference between standard databases (SQL, but also many NoSQL such as MongoDB, Riak, or CouchDB) and Elasticsearch is the number of facilities to express text queries.

The span query family is a group of queries that control a sequence of text tokens via their positions: the standard queries don't take care of positional presence of text tokens.

Span queries allow defining 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 so on)

Getting ready

You need an up-and-running Elasticsearch installation as we described in the Downloading and installing Elasticsearch recipe in Chapter 2, Downloading and Setup.

To execute curl via the command line, you need to install curl for your operative system.

To correctly execute the following commands, you need an index...