The Elasticsearch Query DSL is a rich, flexible, powerful query language for full text and structured search, but with power comes complexity.  Which of the 40 available queries should you use? What's a filter and when should you use it?  How do you combine multiple filters, or multiple queries or queries with filters?

To most users, "relevance", and how it is affected by different queries, is a black box.  Multi-field queries in particular can be difficult to get right if you don't understand how they work. 

In this talk, I will explain the Query DSL from the ground up: how filters and queries use the inverted index to find matching documents, how the relevance score is calculated, how to combine the filter/query building blocks into complex statements. And finally, I will talk about the pitfalls of multi-field queries and how to avoid them.