Elasticsearch does not fuzzy

Question

I struggle to perform a fuzzy search with Elasticsearch 7.10.

My request is the following:

{
  "size": 5,
  "from": 0,
  "query": {
    "fuzzy": {
      "name": {
        "value": "P2",
        "fuzziness": "AUTO",
        "prefix_length": 0,
        "max_expansions": 50
      }
    }
  },
  "track_scores": false
}

While I have a record looking like:

{
  "bookId": "book-2",
  "name": "Programming #2",
  "entries": 36
}

The name is declared as {type: "text", fielddata: true}, and, despite that, I have no result. Can you give me a hint regarding my mistake?

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65940815/elasticsearch-does-not-fuzzy

Answer 1

From docs:

Returns documents that contain terms similar to the search term, as measured by a Levenshtein edit distance.

An edit distance is the number of one-character changes needed to turn one term into another. These changes can include:

• Changing a character (box → fox)
• Removing a character (black → lack)
• Inserting a character (sic → sick)
• Transposing two adjacent characters (act → cat)

Your query "P2" doesn't match any of these cases. You might achieve this kind of behavior by changing source data or implementing analyzers that handle these kinds of use cases.