Span queries are low-level positional queries which provide expert control over the order and proximity of the specified terms. These are typically used to implement very specific queries on legal documents or patents.
It is only allowed to set boost on an outer span query. Compound span queries, like span_near, only use the list of matching spans of inner span queries in order to find their own spans, which they then use to produce a score. Scores are never computed on inner span queries, which is the reason why boosts are not allowed: they only influence the way scores are computed, not spans.
Span queries cannot be mixed with non-span queries (with the exception of the span_multi
query).
The queries in this group are:
span_term
query
term
query but for use with
other span queries.
span_multi
query
term
, range
,
prefix
, wildcard
,
regexp
, or fuzzy
query.
span_first
query
span_near
query
span_or
query
span_not
query
span_containing
query
span_within
query
field_masking_span
query
span-near
or span-or
across different fields.