Contains Query or Partial matching in Elasticsearch

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I'm looking to search a word say "amend" which may be present in data as "amending", "amendment" or even "*amend". Which is the best method to search words like these? I know wildcard can achieve this but I am restricted to not using it due to my other part of the code. What are the different ways which provides better search performance?

You can look into using The ngram tokenizer, elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/… – R4nc1d Sep 27, 2018 at 8:54

You can implement this using query_string feature of elasticsearch. Assuming that you use default standard analyzer .

"query":{ "query_string":{ "default_field":"Customer", "query":"*Jo*"

You can add multiple fields as well as shown in the below query

"query":{ "query_string":{ "fields":[ "Customer", "Name" "query":"*Jo*"

Second you can use n-gram tokenizer. You can check here https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/analysis-ngram-tokenizer.html

It will breaks your value "amending" to words like ["ame","men","end" ... etc]

Once you done with applying n-gram tokeinzer, Start indexing your data.

You can query like below:

{"query":{"term":{"text":"amend"}}}

You will get your output result.

I have indexed data as "amendment" but when using your query, it is showing no results. Should term be mentioned? – Ronnie Sep 27, 2018 at 12:45

What you're describing with the terms "amend", "amendment" and "amending" is called keyword stemming. You can add a stemmer token filter to your Elastic index settings.

For Example:

PUT /my_index
    "settings": {
        "analysis" : {
            "analyzer" : {
                "my_analyzer" : {
                    "tokenizer" : "standard",
                    "filter" : ["standard", "lowercase", "my_stemmer"]
            "filter" : {
                "my_stemmer" : {
                    "type" : "stemmer",
                    "name" : "english"
Using this stemmer will index the terms [amend, amending, amendment] as [amend, amend, amend].
Then you can do a match query and it should return what you're wanting.
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