ElasticSearch: Full-Text Search made easy - search

Question

I am investigate possibility to switch to ElasticSearch from SphinxSearch.
What is good about SphinxSearch - full-text search just work out of the bot on pretty good level. Make it work on ElasticSearch appeared not as easy as I expected.
In my project I have search box with typeahead, means I stype Clint E and see dropdown with results including Clint Eastwood on the first place. Type robert down and see Robert Downey Jr. on the first place. All this I achieved with SphinxSearch out of the box just providing it my DB credentials and SQL query to pull the necessary fields.
On the other hand, with ElasticSearch I can't get satisfying results even after a day of reading about Fuzzy Like This Query, matching, partial matching and other. A lot of information but it does not make task easier. I feel like I need to be PhD in search just to make it work at simplest level.
So far I ended up with such configuration
{
"settings": {
"analysis": {
"analyzer": {
"stem": {
"tokenizer": "standard",
"filter": [
"standard",
"lowercase",
"stop",
"porter_stem"
]
}
}
}
},
"mappings": {
"movies": {
"dynamic": true,
"properties": {
"title": {
"type": "string",
"analyzer": "stem"
}
}
}
}
}
The Query look like this:
{
"query": {
"query_string": {
"query": "clint eastw"
"default_field": "title"
}
}
}
But quality of search in this case is not satisfying at all - back to my example, it can not find Clint Eastwood profile until I type his name completely.
Then I tried to use
{
"query": {
"fuzzy_like_this": {
"fields": [
"title"
],
"like_text": "clint eastw",
"max_query_terms": 25,
"fuzziness": 0.5
}
}
}
It helps but not much, now I can find what I need with shorter request clint eastwo and after some manipulations with parameters with clint eastw but still not encouraging.
So I wonder, is there a simple recipe how to cook full-text search with ElasticSearch and get decent quality of results. I spend a day reading but didn't find the solution.
Couple of images to demonstrate what I am talking about:
Elastic, name almost complete but no expected result, note that there is no better match as well.
One letter after, elastic found it!
At the same moment Sphinx shining :)

Answer 1

Elasticsearch ships with auto completion suggester.
You need not put this into query functioanility , the way it works is on token level and not on partial token level.
Go for completion suggester , it also have support for fuzzy logic.