elasticsearch boost importance of exact phrase match

Question

Is there a way in elasticsearch to boost the importance of the exact phrase appearing in the the document?

For example if I was searching for the phrase "web developer" and if the words "web developer" appeared together they would be boosted by 5 compared to "web" and "developer" appearing separately throughout the document. Thereby any document that contained "web developer" together would appear first in the results.

Answer 1

You can combine different queries together using a bool query, and you can assing a different boost to them as well. Let's say you have a regular match query for both the terms, regardless of their positions, and then a phrase query with a higher boost.

Something like the following:

{
  "query": {
    "bool": {
      "should": [
        {
          "match": {
            "field": "web developer"
          }
        },
        {
          "match_phrase": {
            "field": "web developer",
            "boost": 5
          }
        }
      ],
      "minimum_number_should_match": 1
    }
  }
}