position_increment_gap

Analyzed text fields take term positions into account, in order to be able to support proximity or phrase queries. When indexing text fields with multiple values a "fake" gap is added between the values to prevent most phrase queries from matching across the values. The size of this gap is configured using position_increment_gap and defaults to 100.

For example:

 PUT my-index-000001/_doc/1 { "names": [ "John Abraham", "Lincoln Smith"] } GET my-index-000001/_search { "query": { "match_phrase": { "names": { "query": "Abraham Lincoln" } } } } GET my-index-000001/_search { "query": { "match_phrase": { "names": { "query": "Abraham Lincoln", "slop": 101 } } } } 

1. This phrase query doesn’t match our document which is totally expected.
2. This phrase query matches our document, even though Abraham and Lincoln are in separate strings, because slop > position_increment_gap.

The position_increment_gap can be specified in the mapping. For instance:

 PUT my-index-000001 { "mappings": { "properties": { "names": { "type": "text", "position_increment_gap": 0 } } } } PUT my-index-000001/_doc/1 { "names": [ "John Abraham", "Lincoln Smith"] } GET my-index-000001/_search { "query": { "match_phrase": { "names": "Abraham Lincoln" } } } 

1. The first term in the next array element will be 0 terms apart from the last term in the previous array element.
2. The phrase query matches our document which is weird, but its what we asked for in the mapping.