Highlighting results
Elasticsearch performs a good job of finding matching results also 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 that has matched the query. The abstract is a common way to help users to understand how the matched document is relevant to them.
The highlight functionality in Elasticsearch is designed to do this job.
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.
How to do it...
For searching and highlighting the results, we will perform the following:
From the command line, we can execute a search...