Find documents with empty string value on elasticsearch

If you are using the default analyzer (standard) there is nothing for it to analyze if it is an empty string. So you need to index the field verbatim (not analyzed). Here is an example:

Add a mapping that will index the field untokenized, if you need a tokenized copy of the field indexed as well you can use a Multi Field type.

PUT http://localhost:9200/test/_mapping/demo
{
  "demo": {
    "properties": {
      "_content": {
        "type": "string",
        "index": "not_analyzed"
      }
    }
  }
}

Next, index a couple of documents.

/POST http://localhost:9200/test/demo/1/
{
  "_content": ""
}

/POST http://localhost:9200/test/demo/2
{
  "_content": "some content"
}

Execute a search:

POST http://localhost:9200/test/demo/_search
{
  "query": {
    "filtered": {
      "filter": {
        "term": {
          "_content": ""
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Returns the document with the empty string.

{
    took: 2,
    timed_out: false,
    _shards: {
        total: 5,
        successful: 5,
        failed: 0
    },
    hits: {
        total: 1,
        max_score: 0.30685282,
        hits: [
            {
                _index: test,
                _type: demo,
                _id: 1,
                _score: 0.30685282,
                _source: {
                    _content: ""
                }
            }
        ]
    }
}