Case of the Missing Match

Your product search stores the title "Running Shoes" verbatim as one indexed string. A user types "running shoe" and gets zero results even though the item is in the index. What is missing from the pipeline?

A higher BM25 k1 value, so repeated terms in short product titles count for more in the score

A hand-maintained synonym list mapping each plural product noun to its singular at query time

An analyzer that tokenizes the field and lowercases and stems it, at index and query time

More replicas, so the query reaches a shard copy that has already caught up with recent writes