Basic queries

Elasticsearch has extensive search and data analysis capabilities that are exposed in forms of different queries, filters, aggregates, and so on. In this section, we will concentrate on the basic queries provided by Elasticsearch. By basic queries we mean the ones that don't combine the other queries together but run on their own.

The term query

The term query is one of the simplest queries in Elasticsearch. It just matches the document that has a term in a given field - the exact, not analyzed term. The simplest term query is as follows:

{
  "query" : {
  "term" : {
    "title" : "crime"
  }
  }
}

It will match the documents that have the term crime in the title field. Remember that the term query is not analyzed, so you need to provide the exact term that will match the term in the indexed document. Note that in our input data, we have the title field with the value of Crime and Punishment (upper cased), but we are searching for crime...