Phrase suggestions (did you mean) in Elasticsearch - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Elasticsearch Phrase Suggestions (Did You Mean)

📖 Scenario: You are building a search feature for an online bookstore. Users often mistype book titles or author names. To improve user experience, you want to add a 'Did you mean?' phrase suggestion feature that helps correct their search queries.

🎯 Goal: Create an Elasticsearch phrase suggestion query that suggests corrections for misspelled search terms entered by users.

📋 What You'll Learn

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

Add a phrase suggestion query to suggest corrections for the title field.

Set the phrase suggestion to use the title field and provide a sample misspelled input.

Configure the phrase suggestion with max_errors set to 2 and size set to 1.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Phrase suggestions improve search experience by helping users find correct results even when they mistype queries.

💼 Career

Understanding phrase suggestions is useful for roles in search engineering, data engineering, and backend development working with Elasticsearch.

1

Create the Elasticsearch index books with a title field

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

Elasticsearch

# Create the index with mapping for title field

Need a hint?

Use the PUT /books API with a JSON body defining the mappings and properties.

2

Add a phrase suggestion query with misspelled input

Write a phrase suggestion query that suggests corrections for the title field using the misspelled text "harry poter".

Elasticsearch

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

{
  "suggest": {
    "text": "harry poter",
    "phrase_suggestion": {
      "phrase": {
        "field": "title"
      }
    }
  }
}
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the suggest object with text and a named suggestion containing phrase and field.

3

Configure phrase suggestion with max_errors and size

Add max_errors set to 2 and size set to 1 inside the phrase object of the phrase suggestion query.

Elasticsearch

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

{
  "suggest": {
    "text": "harry poter",
    "phrase_suggestion": {
      "phrase": {
        "field": "title",
        "max_errors": 2,
        "size": 1
      }
    }
  }
}
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Add max_errors and size inside the phrase object to control suggestion behavior.

4

Complete the phrase suggestion query for Elasticsearch

Ensure the full Elasticsearch phrase suggestion query includes the suggest object with text set to "harry poter", the phrase suggestion named phrase_suggestion, and the phrase object with field set to "title", max_errors set to 2, and size set to 1.

Elasticsearch

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

{
  "suggest": {
    "text": "harry poter",
    "phrase_suggestion": {
      "phrase": {
        "field": "title",
        "max_errors": 2,
        "size": 1
      }
    }
  }
}
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Double-check the full phrase suggestion query structure matches the requirements.