title: What actually norms store in Elasticsearch
body: <p>I came across a mapping where, on some fields, which uses <code>custom analyzer</code>, <strong>norms</strong> are disabled.</p>
  
  <p>Then I read about Norms and <a href="https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/norms.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/norms.html</a> found this official doc, but it doesn't explain clearly <strong>what exactly it stores and how actually its useful in scoring</strong>.</p>
  
  <p>Below is the snippet from above link:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>Norms store various normalization factors that are later used at query
    time in order to compute the score of a document relatively to a
    query.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>I found some other docs which gave some more information and advised to <strong>Disable Norms for Analyzed Fields</strong> like <strong>numbers to represent the relative field length and the index time boost setting</strong>. But still I am unable to understand it completely.</p>
  
  <p>So, In short I have below doubts:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>What exactly norms store?  </li>
  <li>What exactly is relative field length and how it's useful for scoring?</li>
  <li>Default value of norms?</li>
  <li>Can I see the content of norms using some ES query?</li>
  </ol>