How to search nested objects with Elasticsearch

You don't necessarily need to nest video; you can map it as a normal field. Which means it will store

'video:title': "This is a test title for a video3",
'video:description':"This is my video description3",
'video:url':"/url_of_video3"

And you can search for video.title:'test'.

As far as I get it, nested fields are useful when you have multiple nested items, and you want to make a query only for the nested items. For example, having this data

[{
    id:4635,
    description:"This is a test description",
    author:"John",
    author_id:51421,
    video: [
      {
        title:"This is a test title for a video",
        description:"This is my video description",
        url:"/url_of_video"
      },
      {
        title:"This is an example title for a video",
        description:"This is my video description2",
        url:"/url_of_video2"
      }
    ]
},
{
    id:4637,
    description:"This is a test description3",
    author:"John",
    author_id:51421,
    video: [
      {
        title:"This is a test title for a video3",
        description:"This is my video description3",
        url:"/url_of_video3"
      }
    ]
}]

If you would search for video.title: 'test' and video.description: 'description2', and video was not nested, it will give you a fake result (because test is in the first video and description2 in the second, but in all the video field you have both).

In this case, if you map video as nested, it will remember each video as a separate entity and will search for individual videos that fit those conditions, so for video.title: 'test' and video.description: 'description2' it will return nothing, for video.title: 'example' and video.description: 'description2' it will return one result.

OK, I finally found these pages (should have taken more time with the docs beforehand) and it seems we set the property that holds the video to type:nested, then use nested queries.

http://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/query-dsl-nested-query.html

http://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/query-dsl-nested-filter.html

Hope this helps someone down the road.

If you want to put it in Rest API URL format

/_search?pretty&q=video.title:*test*

You can use the .keyword suffix if the name of the nested object is unique:

{
        'query': {
            'term': {
                'title.keyword': "This is a test title for a video"               
            }
        }
}

Which should match your first example entry. Note that the video object name is not specified anywhere; this matches on all objects that have a title sub-object.