Elasticsearch query to search across indexes for geo and non-geo data?

Question

I have two indexes, businesses and categories. Each have different mappings, one of those differences being that businesses has a geofield (lat/lng) associated with it. I would like to perform a query where a user could perform an autocomplete search that would span the two indexes (think Yelp.com). Additionally, the user's location would be provided so that only businesses in some x distance would appear. However, any categories that match the search should appear, as it doesn't matter where a user is located when returning categories. Because I do not associate categories with a geofield, I'm getting an error that the geofield property can't be found, and rightfully so (it works when I just query businesses). Is there a way to structure my query so that one statement only looks at one index, and one statement only looks at another index? Or do I need to give the categories some "dummy" geofield that would be ignored by adding a type property and using an or operator for "type":"category"? I.e., "matches the geoquery OR is type:category".

Answer 1

If I understand what you want to do, it can be rephrased as a boolean expression, like:

("index == businesses" AND "<geoquery> is OK") OR ("index == categories" AND "<categoryquery> is OK")

Here are a few hints to achieve this query :

• An OR query can be defined in elasticsearch as a "bool" query with 2 or more "should" clauses and "minimum_should_match" set to 1
• An AND query can be defined in elasticsearch as a "bool" query with 2 or more "must" clauses
• You can check the index in your 2 subqueries using the "_index" field:
  • https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/mapping-index-field.html
• You will have to define the geopoint field in the mapping of "categories" index (not necessarily in the json documents of "categories" index)

You did not provide the geoquery and categoryquery, so i'll let them as placeholders, you will just have to replace them.

You should try something like this (elasticsearch v5.2.2 syntax, should work in elasticsearch v2.0 too) :

GET businesses,categories/_search
{
    "query": {
        "bool": {
            "minimum_should_match": 1,
            "should": [{
                    "bool": {
                        "must": [
                            {
                                "term": {
                                    "_index": "businesses"
                                }
                            },
                            {
                                "<your_geoip_query>": {
                                    <your_geoip_query_params>
                                }
                            }
                        ]
                    }
                },
                {
                    "bool": {
                        "must": [
                            {
                                "term": {
                                    "_index": "categories"
                                }
                            },
                            {
                                "<your_category_query>": {
                                    <your_category_query_params>
                                }
                            }
                        ]
                    }
                }
            ]
        }
    }
}