Filters documents that have fields that match any of the provided terms (not analyzed). For example:

GET /_search
{
    "query": {
        "terms" : { "user" : ["kimchy", "elasticsearch"]}
    }
}

Highlighting terms queries is best-effort only, so terms of a terms query might not be highlighted depending on the highlighter implementation that is selected and on the number of terms in the terms query.

Terms lookup mechanism

When it’s needed to specify a terms filter with a lot of terms it can be beneficial to fetch those term values from a document in an index. A concrete example would be to filter tweets tweeted by your followers. Potentially the amount of user ids specified in the terms filter can be a lot. In this scenario it makes sense to use the terms filter’s terms lookup mechanism.

The terms lookup mechanism supports the following options:

The values for the terms filter will be fetched from a field in a document with the specified id in the specified type and index. Internally a get request is executed to fetch the values from the specified path. At the moment for this feature to work the _source needs to be stored.

Also, consider using an index with a single shard and fully replicated across all nodes if the "reference" terms data is not large. The lookup terms filter will prefer to execute the get request on a local node if possible, reducing the need for networking.

Executing a Terms Query request with a lot of terms can be quite slow, as each additional term demands extra processing and memory. To safeguard against this, the maximum number of terms that can be used in a Terms Query both directly or through lookup has been limited to 65536. This default maximum can be changed for a particular index with the index setting index.max_terms_count.

Terms lookup twitter example

At first we index the information for user with id 2, specifically, its followers, then index a tweet from user with id 1. Finally we search on all the tweets that match the followers of user 2.

PUT /users/_doc/2
{
    "followers" : ["1", "3"]
}

PUT /tweets/_doc/1
{
    "user" : "1"
}

GET /tweets/_search
{
    "query" : {
        "terms" : {
            "user" : {
                "index" : "users",
                "id" : "2",
                "path" : "followers"
            }
        }
    }
}

The structure of the external terms document can also include an array of inner objects, for example:

PUT /users/_doc/2
{
 "followers" : [
   {
     "id" : "1"
   },
   {
     "id" : "2"
   }
 ]
}

In which case, the lookup path will be followers.id.