The search API allows you to execute a search query and get back search hits that match the query. The query can either be provided using a simple query string as a parameter, or using a request body.

Multi-Index

All search APIs can be applied across multiple indices with support for the multi index syntax. For example, we can search on all documents within the twitter index:

GET /twitter/_search?q=user:kimchy

We can also search all documents with a certain tag across several indices (for example, when there is one index per user):

GET /kimchy,elasticsearch/_search?q=tag:wow

Or we can search across all available indices using _all:

GET /_all/_search?q=tag:wow

Partial responses

To ensure fast responses, the search API will respond with partial results if one or more shards fail. See Shard failures for more information.