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Full-Body Search

Search lite—a query-string search—is useful for ad hoc queries from the command line. To harness the full power of search, however, you should use the request body search API, so called because most parameters are passed in the HTTP request body instead of in the query string.

Request body search—​henceforth known as search—not only handles the query itself, but also allows you to return highlighted snippets from your results, aggregate analytics across all results or subsets of results, and return did-you-mean suggestions, which will help guide your users to the best results quickly.

Empty Search

Let’s start with the simplest form of the search API, the empty search, which returns all documents in all indices:

GET /_search
{} (1)

  1. This is an empty request body.

Just as with a query-string search, you can search on one, many, or _all indices, and one, many, or all types:

GET /index_2014*/type1,type2/_search
{}

And you can use the from and size parameters for pagination:

GET /_search
{
  "from": 30,
  "size": 10
}
A GET Request with a Body?

The HTTP libraries of certain languages (notably JavaScript) don’t allow GET requests to have a request body. In fact, some users are suprised that GET requests are ever allowed to have a body.

The truth is that RFC 7231—the RFC that deals with HTTP semantics and content—​does not define what should happen to a GET request with a body! As a result, some HTTP servers allow it, and some—​especially caching proxies—​don’t.

The authors of Elasticsearch prefer using GET for a search request because they feel that it describes the action—​retrieving information—​better than the POST verb. However, because GET with a request body is not universally supported, the search API also accepts POST requests:

POST /_search
{
  "from": 30,
  "size": 10
}

The same rule applies to any other GET API that requires a request body.

We present aggregations in depth in [aggregations], but for now, we’re going to focus just on the query.

Instead of the cryptic query-string approach, a request body search allows us to write queries by using the query domain-specific language, or query DSL.