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The Empty Search

The most basic form of the search API is the empty search, which doesn’t specify any query but simply returns all documents in all indices in the cluster:

GET /_search

The response (edited for brevity) looks something like this:

{
   "hits" : {
      "total" :       14,
      "hits" : [
        {
          "_index":   "us",
          "_type":    "tweet",
          "_id":      "7",
          "_score":   1,
          "_source": {
             "date":    "2014-09-17",
             "name":    "John Smith",
             "tweet":   "The Query DSL is really powerful and flexible",
             "user_id": 2
          }
       },
        ... 9 RESULTS REMOVED ...
      ],
      "max_score" :   1
   },
   "took" :           4,
   "_shards" : {
      "failed" :      0,
      "successful" :  10,
      "total" :       10
   },
   "timed_out" :      false
}

hits

The most important section of the response is hits, which contains the total number of documents that matched our query, and a hits array containing the first 10 of those matching documents—​the results.

Each result in the hits array contains the _index, _type, and _id of the document, plus the _source field. This means that the whole document is immediately available to us directly from the search results. This is unlike other search engines, which return just the document ID, requiring you to fetch the document itself in a separate step.

Each element also has a score. This is the _relevance score, which is a measure of how well the document matches the query. By default, results are returned with the most relevant documents first; that is, in descending order of _score. In this case, we didn’t specify any query, so all documents are equally relevant, hence the neutral _score of 1 for all results.

The max_score value is the highest _score of any document that matches our query.

took

The took value tells us how many milliseconds the entire search request took to execute.

shards

The _shards element tells us the total number of shards that were involved in the query and, of them, how many were successful and how many failed. We wouldn’t normally expect shards to fail, but it can happen. If we were to suffer a major disaster in which we lost both the primary and the replica copy of the same shard, there would be no copies of that shard available to respond to search requests. In this case, Elasticsearch would report the shard as failed, but continue to return results from the remaining shards.

timeout

The timed_out value tells us whether the query timed out. By default, search requests do not time out. If low response times are more important to you than complete results, you can specify a timeout as 10 or 10ms (10 milliseconds), or 1s (1 second):

GET /_search?timeout=10ms

Elasticsearch will return any results that it has managed to gather from each shard before the requests timed out.

Warning

It should be noted that this timeout does not halt the execution of the query; it merely tells the coordinating node to return the results collected so far and to close the connection. In the background, other shards may still be processing the query even though results have been sent.

Use the time-out because it is important to your SLA, not because you want to abort the execution of long-running queries.