Executing a search

Elasticsearch was born as a search engine: its main purpose is to process queries and give results.

In this recipe, we'll see that a search in Elasticsearch is not only limited to matching documents, but it can also calculate additional information required to improve the search quality.

Getting ready

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

To execute curl via a command line, you need to install curl for your operating system.

To correctly execute the following commands you will need an index populated with the chapter_05/populate_query.sh script available in the online code.

The mapping used in all these chapter queries and searches is the following:

{ 
  "mappings": { 
    "test-type": { 
      "properties": { 
        "pos": { 
          "type": "integer", 
          "store": "yes" 
        }, 
        "uuid": { 
...