Highlighting

You have probably heard of highlighting or even if you are not familiar with the name you've probably seen highlighting results on the usual web pages that you visit. Highlighting is the process of showing which word or words for the query were matched in the resulting documents. For example, if we search Google for the word lucene you will see it in bold in the results list, for example:

In this chapter, we will see how to use the ElasticSearch highlighting capabilities to enhance our application with highlighted results.

Getting started with highlighting

There is no better way of showing how highlighting works than making a query and looking at the results returned by ElasticSearch. So let's do that. Let's assume that we would like to highlight the words that were matched in the title field of our documents to increase the search experience of our users. We are again looking for the word crime and we would like to get highlighted results, so the following query would have to...