Full-text search engine concept in Elasticsearch - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Build a Simple Full-Text Search with Elasticsearch

📖 Scenario: You are creating a small search engine for a library's book collection. The library wants to quickly find books by searching words in the title or description.

🎯 Goal: Build a basic Elasticsearch setup that stores book data and allows searching for books by keywords in their titles or descriptions.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create an Elasticsearch index called library with appropriate mappings for text fields

Add a few book documents with title and description fields

Write a search query to find books matching a keyword in either title or description

Display the search results showing the book titles

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Full-text search engines help users find relevant information quickly in large collections of documents, like books, articles, or websites.

💼 Career

Understanding how to set up and query Elasticsearch is valuable for roles in data engineering, backend development, and search engine optimization.

1

Create the Elasticsearch index with mappings

Write a command to create an Elasticsearch index called library with mappings for title and description fields as text type.

Elasticsearch

# Your code here to create the index with mappings

Need a hint?

Use the PUT method to create the index and define mappings with properties for title and description as text.

2

Add book documents to the index

Add three book documents to the library index with these exact entries:
1: title: 'The Great Gatsby', description: 'A novel set in the Jazz Age.'
2: title: 'Learning Elasticsearch', description: 'A guide to full-text search.'
3: title: 'Cooking 101', description: 'Basic recipes for beginners.'

Elasticsearch

PUT /library
{
  "mappings": {
    "properties": {
      "title": { "type": "text" },
      "description": { "type": "text" }
    }
  }
}

# Your code here to add the three book documents

Need a hint?

Use POST /library/_doc/<id> to add each book with the exact title and description.

3

Write a search query for a keyword

Write a search query to find books in the library index where the keyword search appears in either the title or description fields. Use a multi_match query with query set to search and fields set to ["title", "description"].

Elasticsearch

PUT /library
{
  "mappings": {
    "properties": {
      "title": { "type": "text" },
      "description": { "type": "text" }
    }
  }
}

POST /library/_doc/1
{
  "title": "The Great Gatsby",
  "description": "A novel set in the Jazz Age."
}

POST /library/_doc/2
{
  "title": "Learning Elasticsearch",
  "description": "A guide to full-text search."
}

POST /library/_doc/3
{
  "title": "Cooking 101",
  "description": "Basic recipes for beginners."
}

# Your code here to write the search query for keyword 'search'

Need a hint?

Use GET /library/_search with a multi_match query specifying query as search and fields as ["title", "description"].

4

Display the titles of the search results

Write a command to display only the title fields from the search results of the previous query. Use _source filtering to include only title in the output.

Elasticsearch

PUT /library
{
  "mappings": {
    "properties": {
      "title": { "type": "text" },
      "description": { "type": "text" }
    }
  }
}

POST /library/_doc/1
{
  "title": "The Great Gatsby",
  "description": "A novel set in the Jazz Age."
}

POST /library/_doc/2
{
  "title": "Learning Elasticsearch",
  "description": "A guide to full-text search."
}

POST /library/_doc/3
{
  "title": "Cooking 101",
  "description": "Basic recipes for beginners."
}

GET /library/_search
{
  "query": {
    "multi_match": {
      "query": "search",
      "fields": ["title", "description"]
    }
  }
}

# Your code here to display only the titles from the search results

Need a hint?

Add "_source": ["title"] to the search query to show only the titles in the results.