Simple Query String Query

A query that uses the SimpleQueryParser to parse its context. Unlike the regular query_string query, the simple_query_string query will never throw an exception, and discards invalid parts of the query. Here is an example:

GET /_search
{
  "query": {
    "simple_query_string" : {
        "query": "\"fried eggs\" +(eggplant | potato) -frittata",
        "fields": ["title^5", "body"],
        "default_operator": "and"
    }
  }
}

The simple_query_string top level parameters include:

The simple_query_string supports the following special characters:

In order to search for any of these special characters, they will need to be escaped with \.

Be aware that this syntax may have a different behavior depending on the default_operator value. For example, consider the following query:

GET /_search
{
    "query": {
        "simple_query_string" : {
            "fields" : ["content"],
            "query" : "foo bar -baz"
        }
    }
}

You may expect that documents containing only "foo" or "bar" will be returned, as long as they do not contain "baz", however, due to the default_operator being OR, this really means "match documents that contain "foo" or documents that contain "bar", or documents that don’t contain "baz". If this is unintended then the query can be switched to "foo bar +-baz" which will not return documents that contain "baz".

When not explicitly specifying the field to search on in the query string syntax, the index.query.default_field will be used to derive which fields to search on. It defaults to * and the query will automatically attempt to determine the existing fields in the index’s mapping that are queryable, and perform the search on those fields.

The fields parameter can also include pattern based field names, allowing to automatically expand to the relevant fields (dynamically introduced fields included). For example:

GET /_search
{
    "query": {
        "simple_query_string" : {
            "fields" : ["content", "name.*^5"],
            "query" : "foo bar baz"
        }
    }
}

simple_query_string support multiple flags to specify which parsing features should be enabled. It is specified as a |-delimited string with the flags parameter:

GET /_search
{
    "query": {
        "simple_query_string" : {
            "query" : "foo | bar + baz*",
            "flags" : "OR|AND|PREFIX"
        }
    }
}

The available flags are: ALL, NONE, AND, OR, NOT, PREFIX, PHRASE, PRECEDENCE, ESCAPE, WHITESPACE, FUZZY, NEAR, and SLOP.

The simple_query_string query supports multi-terms synonym expansion with the synonym_graph token filter. When this filter is used, the parser creates a phrase query for each multi-terms synonyms. For example, the following synonym: "ny, new york" would produce:

(ny OR ("new york"))

It is also possible to match multi terms synonyms with conjunctions instead:

GET /_search
{
   "query": {
       "simple_query_string" : {
           "query" : "ny city",
           "auto_generate_synonyms_phrase_query" : false
       }
   }
}

The example above creates a boolean query:

(ny OR (new AND york)) city)

that matches documents with the term ny or the conjunction new AND york. By default the parameter auto_generate_synonyms_phrase_query is set to true.