In Azure Cognitive Search query, how do I know which property of document is search hit?

Question

In Azure Cognitive Search query, how do I know which property of document is search hit?

Manish Rathore 0

Hello,

This is regarding querying azure cognitive search service.

Question: If I have Student document that has FirstName, LastName, Address and CollegeName fields. When I fire a query and query returns list of documents, how would I know which field of the document is the search hit?

Ex. If I search "John" and following is returned in search, how would I know if field FirstName is search hit?
Student 1:
{

FirstName:"John",
LastName:"Smith",
Address:"901 PeachTree Street"
CollegeName: "UT - Austin"

}

VenkateshDodda-MSFT 25,111 Reputation points Microsoft Employee Moderator

2023-10-05T13:25:15.4933333+00:00

Hello @Manish Rathore ,

Following up to see if you have a chance to check previous response from brtrach-MSFT and helped. Do let us know if you have any further questions on this.

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VenkateshDodda-MSFT 25,111 Reputation points Microsoft Employee Moderator

2023-10-05T13:25:15.4933333+00:00

Hello @Manish Rathore ,

Following up to see if you have a chance to check previous response from brtrach-MSFT and helped. Do let us know if you have any further questions on this.

Answer 1

VenkateshDodda-MSFT 25,111 Microsoft Employee Moderator

@Manish Rathore Thanks for reaching out to Microsoft Q&A, apologize for any inconvenience caused on this.

To achieve, your requirement you can use highlighters technique in cognitive search which is used to text formatting (such as bold or yellow highlights) applied to matching terms in a result, making it easy to spot the match.

Notice that highlighting can be applied to individual terms. There's no highlight capability for the contents of an entire field. If you want to highlight over a phrase, you'll have to provide the matching terms (or phrase) in a quote-enclosed query string.

Highlighting supports Keyword search and Phrase search. You can refer to these documentations on how to specify highlighting in your request explaining with sample response and also about the query parameters in cognitive search.

Feel free to reach back to me if you have any further questions on this.

Manish Rathore 0 Reputation points

2023-09-27T17:57:59.3166667+00:00
Thanks for the response, Venkatesh. What we found that Highlighters are workarounds. We have been using highlighters but then hit a road block.

Consider following example, in this example, if someone search for word "Computer" and query has CourseId and CourseName in highlight section, then the doc with id 1 would be selected and highlight would have "Courses/CourseName" with 2 entries. Problem is, I wouldn't know which course name belongs to which item of array.

{ "Id":"1", "FirstName": "John", "LastName": "Smith", "Address": "901 PeachTree Street", "Courses": [ { "CourseId": "1", "CourseName": "Computer Science" }, { "CourseId": "1", "CourseName": "Computer Technology" } ] }
brtrach-MSFT 17,741 Reputation points Microsoft Employee Moderator

2023-10-02T17:27:16.28+00:00
@Manish Rathore Venkatesh is out of the office today so I will follow up until he returns tomorrow. To address this issue, you can use the hit highlighting feature in combination with the $select parameter. The $select parameter allows you to specify which fields you want to include in the search results. By selecting only the fields that you are interested in, you can reduce the amount of data returned by the search and make it easier to identify which field contains the search hit.

For example, you can modify your query to include the $select parameter and specify only the "Id" and "Courses" fields:

<span class=" active-doc-0" data-doc-items="0">POST /indexes/myindex/docs/search?api-version=2020-06-30[1](#doc-pos=0)</span> { "search": "Computer", "highlight": "Courses/CourseName", "select": "Id,Courses" }

This will return only the "Id" and "Courses" fields for each document that matches the search query. You can then use the hit highlighting feature to identify which "CourseName" field contains the search hit.

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In Azure Cognitive Search query, how do I know which property of document is search hit?

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