Match Query vs Term Query

Match Query

Match query analyzes the search term, based on the standard analyzer (if no analyzer is specified) and then matches the analyzed term with the terms stored in the inverted index. By default text type field uses a standard analyzer if no analyzer is specified. For eg. SchooL gets analyzed to school OR wonder-land will get tokenized into

{
  "tokens": [
    {
      "token": "wonder",
      "start_offset": 0,
      "end_offset": 6,
      "type": "<ALPHANUM>",
      "position": 0
    },
    {
      "token": "land",
      "start_offset": 7,
      "end_offset": 11,
      "type": "<ALPHANUM>",
      "position": 1
    }
  ]
}

Note: Match query when used on keyword type field will behave exactly as that of term query

Term Query

Term query returns documents that contain an exact term in a provided field. If you have not defined any explicit index mapping, then you need to add .keyword to the field. This uses the keyword analyzer instead of the standard analyzer.

When using a keyword analyzer instead of the standard analyzer, wonder-land will be tokenized into wonder-land only. In the case of keyword type fields all the whitespace, special characters in between the words, and case sensitivity is preserved.

To get the correct result of the term query (in case you have defined the field type to be of type text), you can follow the below methods

• If you have defined index mapping, then modify the mapping for field1 as shown below. You need to use multi-fields if you want to map the field as text and keyword types. Update your index mapping as shown below and then don't forget to reindex your data.

PUT /<index-name>/_mapping
{
  "properties": {
    "field1": {
      "type": "text",
      "fields": {
        "keyword": {
          "type": "keyword"
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

• Otherwise, you can create a new index with the below mapping and then index the data in the new index.

PUT /<new-index-name>
{
  "mappings": {
    "properties": {
      "field1": {
        "type": "keyword"
      }
    }
  }
}

Note: You can use the case_insensitive param along with the term query. This parameter will let you decide whether to make the search term case insensitive or not. This parameter was introduced in elasticsearch version 7.10.0