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Highlighting Our Searches

Many applications like to highlight snippets of text from each search result so the user can see why the document matched the query. Retrieving highlighted fragments is easy in Elasticsearch.

Let’s rerun our previous query, but add a new highlight parameter:

GET /megacorp/employee/_search
{
    "query" : {
        "match_phrase" : {
            "about" : "rock climbing"
        }
    },
    "highlight": {
        "fields" : {
            "about" : {}
        }
    }
}

When we run this query, the same hit is returned as before, but now we get a new section in the response called highlight. This contains a snippet of text from the about field with the matching words wrapped in <em></em> HTML tags:

{
   ...
   "hits": {
      "total":      1,
      "max_score":  0.23013961,
      "hits": [
         {
            ...
            "_score":         0.23013961,
            "_source": {
               "first_name":  "John",
               "last_name":   "Smith",
               "age":         25,
               "about":       "I love to go rock climbing",
               "interests": [ "sports", "music" ]
            },
            "highlight": {
               "about": [
                  "I love to go <em>rock</em> <em>climbing</em>" 
               ]
            }
         }
      ]
   }
}

The highlighted fragment from the original text

You can read more about the highlighting of search snippets in the highlighting reference documentation.

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Highlighting Our Searches

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