Catalogue search often has two different jobs hiding behind one endpoint. Natural-language search wants token-aware retrieval. Operational search wants to find an SKU prefix, a serial number, or a wildcarded identifier.

Qdrant ES Gateway accepts Elasticsearch-shaped prefix, wildcard, and regexp clauses in positive bool.must and bool.filter paths. For these supported placements, the client can retain the request shape. The gateway reads candidate documents from Qdrant and evaluates patterns against their fields, combining pattern clauses with ordinary Qdrant-translated filters where supplied. Pattern clauses in either should or must_not are rejected.

Wildcards support Elasticsearch-style * and ?, while regular expressions use Rust/RE2-style syntax. Invalid regular expressions receive a structured 400 response. The compatibility guide lists the boundary.

Pattern matching is a gateway-side scan. A pattern-only query scans the collection in bounded scroll pages; the page size does not bound the total work. This suits modest catalogues and identifier lookups, but not unbounded, high-cardinality pattern queries. If pattern traffic becomes a primary workload, use a dedicated indexed pattern field or a purpose-built search path.