Word-oriented completion suggester (ElasticSearch 5.x)

An additional field skip_duplicates will be added in the next release 6.x.

From the docs at https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/master/search-suggesters-completion.html#skip_duplicates:

POST music/_search?pretty
{
    "suggest": {
        "song-suggest" : {
            "prefix" : "nor",
            "completion" : {
                "field" : "suggest",
                "skip_duplicates": true
            }
        }
    }
}

As hinted at in the comment, another way of achieving this without getting the duplicate documents is to create a sub-field for the firstname field containing ngrams of the field. First you define your mapping like this:

PUT my-index
{
  "settings": {
    "analysis": {
      "analyzer": {
        "completion_analyzer": {
          "type": "custom",
          "filter": [
            "lowercase",
            "completion_filter"
          ],
          "tokenizer": "keyword"
        }
      },
      "filter": {
        "completion_filter": {
          "type": "edge_ngram",
          "min_gram": 1,
          "max_gram": 24
        }
      }
    }
  },
  "mappings": {
    "users": {
      "properties": {
        "autocomplete": {
          "type": "text",
          "fields": {
            "raw": {
              "type": "keyword"
            },
            "completion": {
              "type": "text",
              "analyzer": "completion_analyzer",
              "search_analyzer": "standard"
            }
          }
        },
        "firstName": {
          "type": "text"
        },
        "lastName": {
          "type": "text"
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Then you index a few documents:

POST my-index/users/_bulk
{"index":{}}
{ "firstName": "John", "lastName": "Doe", "autocomplete": "John Doe"}
{"index":{}}
{ "firstName": "John", "lastName": "Deere", "autocomplete": "John Deere" }
{"index":{}}
{ "firstName": "Johnny", "lastName": "Cash", "autocomplete": "Johnny Cash" }

Then you can query for joh and get one result for John and another one for Johnny

{
  "size": 0,
  "query": {
    "term": {
      "autocomplete.completion": "john d"
    }
  },
  "aggs": {
    "suggestions": {
      "terms": {
        "field": "autocomplete.raw"
      }
    }
  }
}

Results:

{
  "aggregations": {
    "suggestions": {
      "doc_count_error_upper_bound": 0,
      "sum_other_doc_count": 0,
      "buckets": [
        {
          "key": "John Doe",
          "doc_count": 1
        },
        {
          "key": "John Deere",
          "doc_count": 1
        }
      ]
    }
  }
}

UPDATE (June 25th, 2019):

ES 7.2 introduced a new data type called search_as_you_type that allows this kind of behavior natively. Read more at: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/7.2/search-as-you-type.html