Highlighting matched text in Elasticsearch - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Highlighting Matched Text in Elasticsearch

📖 Scenario: You are building a search feature for a small online bookstore. When users search for a word, you want to show the book titles with the searched word highlighted so it is easy to spot.

🎯 Goal: Create an Elasticsearch query that searches for the word magic in book titles and highlights the matched word in the results.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create an Elasticsearch index called books with a title field.

Add a document with the title 'The Magic of Thinking Big'.

Write a search query that looks for the word magic in the title field.

Add highlighting to the query so the matched word magic is wrapped in <em> tags in the results.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Highlighting matched text helps users quickly see why a search result was returned, improving user experience in search applications.

💼 Career

Understanding Elasticsearch highlighting is useful for roles involving search engine development, backend engineering, and data retrieval optimization.

1

Create the Elasticsearch index and add a book document

Create an Elasticsearch index called books with a title field. Then add a document with title set to 'The Magic of Thinking Big'.

Elasticsearch

# Create the index and add the document below

Need a hint?

Use PUT to create the index with mappings, then POST to add the document.

2

Set up the search query to find the word 'magic'

Write a search query that looks for the word magic in the title field of the books index.

Elasticsearch

# Add a search query to find 'magic' in the title field below

Need a hint?

Use the match query on the title field with the word magic.

3

Add highlighting to the search query

Add a highlight section to the search query that highlights matches in the title field using <em> tags.

Elasticsearch

# Add the highlight section to the search query below

Need a hint?

Use highlight with fields and specify pre_tags and post_tags for the title field.

4

Display the search results with highlighted matched text

Run the search query and print the highlight section from the first hit to show the matched word magic wrapped in <em> tags.

Elasticsearch

# Print the highlight from the first search hit below

Need a hint?

Extract the highlight field from the first hit in the search results and print it.