What are Analyzers?

Introduction to Full-Text Search

Full-text search allows you to search for documents that contain specific words or phrases. Unlike keyword search, which looks for exact matches, full-text search involves breaking down the text into individual terms (or tokens) and processing them to enable more flexible and comprehensive search capabilities. This is where analyzers and tokenizers come into play....

What are Analyzers?

An analyzer in Elasticsearch is a component that converts text into tokens (terms) and can apply various filters to normalize the tokens. An analyzer typically consists of three parts:...

What are Tokenizers?

A tokenizer is a component of an analyzer that breaks down the text into a stream of tokens. Different tokenizers split text in different ways, depending on the specific use case....

Default Analyzer and Tokenizer

Elasticsearch uses the standard analyzer by default, which includes a standard tokenizer. Let’s see an example to understand how the default analyzer works....

Custom Analyzers

Sometimes, the default analyzer might not fit your needs, and you may need to create a custom analyzer. Custom analyzers allow you to define specific character filters, tokenizers, and token filters to tailor the text analysis process....

Commonly Used Tokenizers

Elasticsearch provides various built-in tokenizers, each suited for different purposes....

Custom Token Filters

Token filters are used to modify the tokens produced by a tokenizer. Common token filters include lowercasing, removing stop words, stemming, and more....

Practical Application: Indexing and Searching

Now that we’ve covered the basics of analyzers and tokenizers, let’s see how to apply them in a practical indexing and searching scenario....

Conclusion

Understanding and utilizing analyzers and tokenizers in Elasticsearch is essential for leveraging its full-text search capabilities. By customizing these components, you can tailor the text processing to fit your specific requirements, resulting in more relevant and effective search results....