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Elasticsearch: The Definitive Guide [2.x] » Search in Depth » Multifield Search » cross-fields Queries
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cross-fields Queriesedit

The custom _all approach is a good solution, as long as you thought about setting it up before you indexed your documents. However, Elasticsearch also provides a search-time solution to the problem: the multi_match query with type cross_fields. The cross_fields type takes a term-centric approach, quite different from the field-centric approach taken by best_fields and most_fields. It treats all of the fields as one big field, and looks for each term in any field.

To illustrate the difference between field-centric and term-centric queries, look at the explanation for this field-centric most_fields query:

GET /_validate/query?explain
{
    "query": {
        "multi_match": {
            "query":       "peter smith",
            "type":        "most_fields",
            "operator":    "and", 
            "fields":      [ "first_name", "last_name" ]
        }
    }
}

All terms are required.

For a document to match, both peter and smith must appear in the same field, either the first_name field or the last_name field:

(+first_name:peter +first_name:smith)
(+last_name:peter  +last_name:smith)

A term-centric approach would use this logic instead:

+(first_name:peter last_name:peter)
+(first_name:smith last_name:smith)

In other words, the term peter must appear in either field, and the term smith must appear in either field.

The cross_fields type first analyzes the query string to produce a list of terms, and then it searches for each term in any field. That difference alone solves two of the three problems that we listed in Field-Centric Queries, leaving us just with the issue of differing inverse document frequencies.

Fortunately, the cross_fields type solves this too, as can be seen from this validate-query request:

GET /_validate/query?explain
{
    "query": {
        "multi_match": {
            "query":       "peter smith",
            "type":        "cross_fields", 
            "operator":    "and",
            "fields":      [ "first_name", "last_name" ]
        }
    }
}

Use cross_fields term-centric matching.

It solves the term-frequency problem by blending inverse document frequencies across fields: 

+blended("peter", fields: [first_name, last_name])
+blended("smith", fields: [first_name, last_name])

In other words, it looks up the IDF of smith in both the first_name and the last_name fields and uses the minimum of the two as the IDF for both fields. The fact that smith is a common last name means that it will be treated as a common first name too.

For the cross_fields query type to work optimally, all fields should have the same analyzer. Fields that share an analyzer are grouped together as blended fields.

If you include fields with a different analysis chain, they will be added to the query in the same way as for best_fields. For instance, if we added the title field to the preceding query (assuming it uses a different analyzer), the explanation would be as follows:

(+title:peter +title:smith)
(
  +blended("peter", fields: [first_name, last_name])
  +blended("smith", fields: [first_name, last_name])
)

This is particularly important when using the minimum_should_match and operator parameters.

Per-Field Boostingedit

One of the advantages of using the cross_fields query over custom _all fields is that you can boost individual fields at query time.

For fields of equal value like first_name and last_name, this generally isn’t required, but if you were searching for books using the title and description fields, you might want to give more weight to the title field. This can be done as described before with the caret (^) syntax:

GET /books/_search
{
    "query": {
        "multi_match": {
            "query":       "peter smith",
            "type":        "cross_fields",
            "fields":      [ "title^2", "description" ] 
        }
    }
}

The title field has a boost of 2, while the description field has the default boost of 1.

The advantage of being able to boost individual fields should be weighed against the cost of querying multiple fields instead of querying a single custom _all field. Use whichever of the two solutions that delivers the most bang for your buck.

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