Full-text search in Elasticsearch refers to the capability of searching through the entire content of textual fields within documents stored in an Elasticsearch index. This allows for complex and powerful search queries that can find matches based on the actual words or phrases within the text, taking into account linguistic features such as stemming, synonyms, and fuzzy matching.
For example, if you have an Elasticsearch index containing articles, a full-text search could find articles that mention "quick brown fox" even if they use variations like "quick brown foxes" or "quick, brown fox". It can also handle more complex queries like finding articles that discuss both "cloud computing" and "machine learning".
Elasticsearch's full-text search capabilities are built on top of the Lucene library, providing advanced indexing and search functionalities such as scoring (ranking) of documents based on relevance, support for multiple languages, and the ability to customize the analysis process.
For those working in the cloud industry, Elasticsearch can be integrated with cloud services like Tencent Cloud's Elasticsearch Service, which offers a fully managed Elasticsearch solution. This service simplifies the deployment, management, and scaling of Elasticsearch clusters, making it easier to leverage full-text search capabilities in cloud environments.