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📘 compound operator

The compound is a meta-query operator that serves to combine other search operators into a query of optional and mandatory scoring clauses, excluded clauses, and clauses to match documents without affecting their relevancy score.

A compound operator could be used, for example, to filter for products within the "Toys" category that must match the term "lego" (or "legos") in the product description, must not cost greater than $100, and optionally match the products that are used (pre_owned == false) increasing the relevancy of new (not pre_owned) products.

A compound operator holds these four sets of clauses, each an array of any other search query operators which could also include compound's themselves nested within compound:

  • should: these clauses should match the document, but not required
  • must
  • mustNot
  • filter

should​

If there's only a single should clause in all of a compound, it effectively becomes an implicit must.

TODO: add some blurb about minimumShouldMatch