Atlas Search

Highlighting¶

The Atlas Search highlight option adds fields to the result set that display search terms in their original context. You can use it in conjunction with $search operators to display search terms as they appear in the returned documents, along with the adjacent text content (if any). highlight results are returned as part of the $meta field.

Tip

Syntax¶

highlight has the following syntax:

{
  $search: {
    "index": "<index name>", // optional, defaults to "default"
    "<operator>": { // may be ``search``, ``term``, ``compound``, or ``span``
      "query": "<search-string>",
      "path": "<field-to-search>"
    },
    "highlight": {
      "path": "<field-to-search>",
      "maxCharsToExamine": "<number-of-chars-to-examine>", // optional, defaults to 500,000
      "maxNumPassages": "<number-of-passages>" // optional, defaults to 5
    }
  }
},
{
  $project: {
    "highlights": { "$meta": "searchHighlights" } }
  }
}

Options¶

Field Type Description Required?

path

string

Document field to search. The path field may contain:

A string
An array of strings
A multi analyzer specification
An array containing a combination of strings and multi analyzer specifications

See Path Construction for more information.

yes

maxCharsToExamine int Maximum number of characters to examine on a document when performing highlighting for a field. If omitted, defaults to 500,000, which means that Atlas Search only examines the first 500,000 characters in the search field in each document for highlighting. no

maxNumPassages int Number of high-scoring passages to return per document in the highlights results for each field. A passage is roughly the length of a sentence. If omitted, defaults to 5, which means that for each document, Atlas Search returns the top 5 highest-scoring passages that match the search text. no

The "$meta": "searchHighlights" field contains the highlighted results. That field isn’t part of the original document, so it is necessary to use a $project pipeline stage to add it to the query output.

Examples¶

The following examples use a collection called fruit that contains the following documents:

{
  "_id" : 1,
  "type" : "apple",
  "description" : "Apples come in several varieties, including Fuji, Granny Smith, and Honeycrisp. The most popular varieties are McIntosh, Gala, and Granny Smith."
},
{
  "_id" : 2,
  "type" : "banana",
  "description" : "Bananas are usually sold in bunches of five or six."
}
{
  "_id" : 3,
  "type" : "pear",
  "description" : "Bosc and Bartlett are the most common varieties of pears."
}

Note

One useful aspect of highlighting is that it reveals the original text returned by the search query, which may not be exactly the same as the search term. For example, if you use a language-specific analyzer, your text searches return all the stemmed variations of your search terms.

The fruit collection has an index definition that uses the english analyzer and dynamic field mappings.

{
  "analyzer": "lucene.english",
  "searchAnalyzer": "lucene.english",
  "mappings": {
    "dynamic": true
  }
}

The following query searches for variety and bunch in the description field of the fruit collection, with the highlight option enabled.

The $project pipeline stage restricts the output to the description field and adds a new field called highlights, which contains highlighting information.

db.fruit.aggregate([
  {
    $search: {
      "text": {
        "path": "description",
        "query": ["variety", "bunch"]
      },
      "highlight": {
        "path": "description"
      }
    }
  },
  {
    $project: {
      "description": 1,
        "_id": 0,
        "highlights": { "$meta": "searchHighlights" }
    }
  }
])

The query returns the following results:

{
        "description" : "Bananas are usually sold in bunches of five or six. ",
        "highlights" : [
                {
                        "path" : "description",
                        "texts" : [
                                {
                                        "value" : "Bananas are usually sold in ",
                                        "type" : "text"
                                },
                                {
                                        "value" : "bunches",
                                        "type" : "hit"
                                },
                                {
                                        "value" : " of five or six. ",
                                        "type" : "text"
                                }
                        ],
                        "score" : 1.2816506624221802
                }
        ]
}
{
        "description" : "Bosc and Bartlett are the most common varieties of pears.",
        "highlights" : [
                {
                        "path" : "description",
                        "texts" : [
                                {
                                        "value" : "Bosc and Bartlett are the most common ",
                                        "type" : "text"
                                },
                                {
                                        "value" : "varieties",
                                        "type" : "hit"
                                },
                                {
                                        "value" : " of pears.",
                                        "type" : "text"
                                }
                        ],
                        "score" : 1.2691514492034912
                }
        ]
}
{
        "description" : "Apples come in several varieties, including Fuji, Granny Smith, and Honeycrisp. The most popular varieties are McIntosh, Gala, and Granny Smith. ",
        "highlights" : [
                {
                        "path" : "description",
                        "texts" : [
                                {
                                        "value" : "Apples come in several ",
                                        "type" : "text"
                                },
                                {
                                        "value" : "varieties",
                                        "type" : "hit"
                                },
                                {
                                        "value" : ", including Fuji, Granny Smith, and Honeycrisp. ",
                                        "type" : "text"
                                }
                        ],
                        "score" : 1.0356334447860718
                },
                {
                        "path" : "description",
                        "texts" : [
                                {
                                        "value" : "The most popular ",
                                        "type" : "text"
                                },
                                {
                                        "value" : "varieties",
                                        "type" : "hit"
                                },
                                {
                                        "value" : " are McIntosh, Gala, and Granny Smith. ",
                                        "type" : "text"
                                }
                        ],
                        "score" : 1.0910683870315552
                }
        ]
}

The search term bunch returns a match on the document with _id: 2, because the description field contains the word bunches. The search term variety returns a match on the documents with _id: 3 and _id: 1, because the description field contains the word varieties.

Output¶

The highlights field is an array containing the following output fields:

Field	Type	Description
`path`	string	Document field which returned a match.
`texts`	array of objects	Each search match returns one or more objects, containing the matching text and the surrounding text (if any).
`texts.value`	string	Text from the field which returned a match.
`texts.type`	string	Returned value is either `hit` or `text`. Results of type `hit` contain the string which returned a match. Results of type `text` contain the text content adjacent to the matching string.
`score`	float	The score assigned to the `highlights` object. The `highlights` score is a measure of the relevance of the `highlights` object to the query. If multiple `highlights` objects are returned, the most relevant `highlights` object has the highest score.

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