Fuzzy matching in Elasticsearch - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Fuzzy Matching with Elasticsearch

📖 Scenario: You are building a simple search feature for a bookstore website. Users often make typos when typing book titles. To help users find books even with small spelling mistakes, you want to use fuzzy matching in Elasticsearch.

🎯 Goal: Create an Elasticsearch query that uses fuzzy matching to find books by title, allowing for small typos.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create an index called books with a title field of type text.

Add a document with the title "The Great Gatsby".

Create a variable called search_title with the value "Gret Gatsb" (a misspelled title).

Write a fuzzy match query using search_title to find the book with a small typo.

Complete the query with a fuzziness parameter set to 1.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Fuzzy matching helps users find information even if they make spelling mistakes or typos in search queries, improving user experience on search engines and websites.

💼 Career

Understanding fuzzy matching is useful for roles involving search engine development, data retrieval, and improving user interfaces for search functionality.

1

Create the books index with a title field

Create an Elasticsearch index called books with a mapping that defines a title field of type text.

Elasticsearch

# Create the books index with title field mapping
{
  "mappings": {
    "properties": {
      "title": {
        "type": "text"
      }
    }
  }
}

Need a hint?

Use the mappings key with properties to define the title field as text.

2

Add a document with the title "The Great Gatsby"

Add a document to the books index with the field title set to "The Great Gatsby".

Elasticsearch

{
  "mappings": {
    "properties": {
      "title": {
        "type": "text"
      }
    }
  }
}

# Add a document with title "The Great Gatsby"
{
  "title": "The Great Gatsby"
}

Need a hint?

Use the document JSON with the title field exactly as shown.

3

Create a variable search_title with the misspelled title

Create a variable called search_title and set it to the string "Gret Gatsb".

Elasticsearch

{
  "mappings": {
    "properties": {
      "title": {
        "type": "text"
      }
    }
  }
}

{
  "title": "The Great Gatsby"
}

# Create search_title variable
"Gret Gatsb"

Need a hint?

Assign the string "Gret Gatsb" to the variable search_title.

4

Write a fuzzy match query using search_title with fuzziness 1

Write an Elasticsearch query that uses a match query on the title field with the value from search_title. Add the parameter fuzziness set to 1 to allow small typos.

Elasticsearch

{
  "mappings": {
    "properties": {
      "title": {
        "type": "text"
      }
    }
  }
}

{
  "title": "The Great Gatsby"
}

"search_title": "Gret Gatsb"

# Write fuzzy match query
{
  "query": {
    "match": {
      "title": {
        "query": "Gret Gatsb",
        "fuzziness": 1
      }
    }
  }
}

Need a hint?

Use a match query with fuzziness set to 1 to allow small typos.