How to boost "starts with" search results above "contains" search results in elastic

Question

I am trying to find a way that I can boost the search results for a particular query such that the search results that have the query at the beginning of the field (i.e. starts with) are above the results that do not.

e.g. Suppose my query is for 'bat'

I want my results to look like

• bat
• bath
• bathe
• abate
• debate

etc.

Answer 1

You could try adding a prefix query with a boost value to make the score for prefix matches higher than the rest of the items.