Boosting query in Elasticsearch - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Boosting Query in Elasticsearch

📖 Scenario: You are building a search feature for an online bookstore. You want to show books that match the user's search term but also want to reduce the rank of books that contain certain negative keywords.

🎯 Goal: Create an Elasticsearch boosting query that increases the score of documents matching a positive term and decreases the score of documents matching a negative term.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create an initial query with a positive match on the field title for the word "adventure".

Add a negative match on the field description for the word "boring".

Set the negative_boost value to 0.2 to reduce the score of negative matches.

Print the final JSON query.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Boosting queries help improve search results by promoting relevant documents and demoting less relevant ones, making search more useful for users.

💼 Career

Understanding boosting queries is important for roles involving search engine optimization, data engineering, and backend development with Elasticsearch.

1

Create the initial positive match query

Create a JSON object called query with a match query on the title field for the word "adventure".

Elasticsearch

{
  "query": {
    "match": {
      "title": "adventure"
    }
  }
}
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the match query inside the query object to search the title field.

2

Add the negative match for boosting

Add a boosting query inside query with a positive match on title for "adventure" and a negative match on description for "boring".

Elasticsearch

{
  "query": {
    "boosting": {
      "positive": {
        "match": {
          "title": "adventure"
        }
      },
      "negative": {
        "match": {
          "description": "boring"
        }
      }
    }
  }
}
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the boosting query with positive and negative keys inside query.

3

Set the negative boost value

Add the negative_boost key with the value 0.2 inside the boosting query to reduce the score of documents matching the negative query.

Elasticsearch

{
  "query": {
    "boosting": {
      "positive": {
        "match": {
          "title": "adventure"
        }
      },
      "negative": {
        "match": {
          "description": "boring"
        }
      },
      "negative_boost": 0.2
    }
  }
}
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Place negative_boost at the same level as positive and negative inside boosting.

4

Print the final boosting query

Print the complete query JSON object.

Elasticsearch

# Print the final query JSON
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print() to display the entire query object.