How do I use wildcards in search queries of my Amazon Kendra index?

Resolution

The wildcard operator (*) is one of the advanced query syntax operators in Amazon Kendra. You can use wildcards to add variants of words or phrases to your index searches.

The wildcard operator in Amazon Kendra has some limitations.

Use at least three search characters and only trailing wildcards

Search terms must be at least three characters in length and include only trailing wildcards. Wildcard search isn't available for search terms that are two characters in length or less or for leading wildcards.

Place search characters after special characters

Search terms that include special characters, such as "-" and ".", affect your search query results. The wildcard operator uses the characters that appear after the special character. The wildcard ignores the characters that are before the special character. The requirement of three search characters or more applies to the characters that appear after the special character.

Example index wildcard search queries

Scenario: You indexed your website's cloud computing blog entries with Amazon Kendra and run the following search queries for testing.

Search query: prod
Result: A handful of entries with "prod" in example resource names.

Search query: prod*
Result: Dozens of entries that include the words "product" and "production."

Search query: *prod
Result: The same entries as your search for "prod" because "*prod" isn't a valid wildcard.

Search queries: *pr, pr*, and pr
Result: All return the same entries because "*pr" and "pr*" aren't valid wildcards.

Search query: prod-1234
Result: A few entries with "prod-1234" as example resource names.

Search query: prod-1234*
Result: Dozens of entries with "1111" in example resource names.

Related information

Querying an index