Building Search API with ElasticSearch — Part 07: “Did you mean”

3 min readJul 12, 2022

The term correction suggestion is a very important feature for the search engine. In the post “Create a simple “did you mean” — ElasticSearch” a term correction solution was implemented using the Phrase suggester.
We will use the same approach to add this functionality to our search engine.

In the same way that we created the suggestion in the post “Create a simple “did you mean” — ElasticSearch”, we will create a new field that will be responsible for suggesting the corrections.

Due to an error in the Java API Client it is not possible to deserialize the results and use the Phrase Suggester. This bug has already been opened in Git and we will be waiting for a new release with the correction.
Meanwhile I did all the implementation using the RestHighClientLevel but left the same implementation with the Java API Client. So we have both implementations.

Java Code

The first thing to do is create a Phrase suggester object by adding the desired parameters to get the best results. Once created, this object will be set in SearchSourceBuilder in the suggester property.

If elastic finds a suggestion for the given term, we must extract the options in SearchResponse. As I said, it will return a list of options, I will only want to display the first option as it will be the closest to being the correct suggestion.

Once the suggestion is retrieved, we will set the “suggestion” property in our MovieCatalogDTO.