Wildcard query

Returns documents that contain terms matching a wildcard pattern.

A wildcard operator is a placeholder that matches one or more characters. For example, the * wildcard operator matches zero or more characters. You can combine wildcard operators with other characters to create a wildcard pattern.

The following search returns documents where the user.id field contains a term that begins with ki and ends with y. These matching terms can include kiy, kity, or kimchy.

 GET /_search {
  "query": {
    "wildcard": {
      "user.id": {
        "value": "ki*y",
        "boost": 1.0,
        "rewrite": "constant_score_blended"
      }
    }
  }
}

<field>

(Required, object) Field you wish to search.

boost

(Optional, float) Floating point number used to decrease or increase the relevance scores of a query. Defaults to 1.0.

You can use the boost parameter to adjust relevance scores for searches containing two or more queries.

Boost values are relative to the default value of 1.0. A boost value between 0 and 1.0 decreases the relevance score. A value greater than 1.0 increases the relevance score.

case_insensitive [7.10.0]

(Optional, Boolean) Allows case insensitive matching of the pattern with the indexed field values when set to true. Default is false which means the case sensitivity of matching depends on the underlying field’s mapping.

rewrite

(Optional, string) Method used to rewrite the query. For valid values and more information, see the rewrite parameter.

value

(Required, string) Wildcard pattern for terms you wish to find in the provided <field>.

This parameter supports two wildcard operators:

• ?, which matches any single character
• *, which can match zero or more characters, including an empty one

Warning

Avoid beginning patterns with * or ?. This can increase the iterations needed to find matching terms and slow search performance.

wildcard

(Required, string) An alias for the value parameter. If you specify both value and wildcard, the query uses the last one in the request body.

Wildcard queries using * can be resource-intensive, particularly with leading wildcards. To improve performance, minimize their use and consider alternatives like the n-gram tokenizer. While this allows for more efficient searching, it may increase index size. For better performance and accuracy, combine wildcard queries with other query types like match or bool to first narrow down results.

Wildcard queries will not be executed if search.allow_expensive_queries is set to false.