Elasticsearch query string query with not equal to?

Question

Usually with a query_string query in elasticsearch, I can do:

name:"Fred"

I want to find all documents where name is not equal to Fred. What is the proper syntax for that? I tried:

name!="Fred"

Though it returns 0 documents.

Answer 1

You need to use the NOT operator, like this:

!(name:"Fred")

or

NOT (name:"Fred")