Using a simple query string query

Typically, the programmer has the control to build complex queries using Boolean queries and the other query types. Thus, Elasticsearch provides two kinds of queries that give the user the ability to create string queries with several operators in them.

These kinds of queries are very common in advanced search engine usage, such as Google, which allows us to use the + and - operators for terms.

Getting ready

You will need an up-and-running Elasticsearch installation, as described in the Downloading and installing Elasticsearch recipe of Chapter 1, Getting Started.

To execute the commands, any HTTP client can be used, such as Curl (https://curl.haxx.se/), Postman (https://www.getpostman.com/), or similar. I suggest you use a Kibana console as it provides code completion and better character escaping for Elasticsearch.

To correctly execute the following commands, you will need an index populated with the ch04/populate_kibana...