Google Search: You enter search terms and it returns documents related to those terms ranked by relevance. There's of course more to Google Search, but ElasticSearch supports many of those algorithms and is a generic document search engine. It comes very close in terms of the supported features and scalability (hence the term Elastic).
Yelp Search: You enter search terms that match some facets (type of business, location, name of business, etc) and it returns a list of matches and additional details about it (address, number, ratings & reviews, etc.)
Pretty much any site where you can search for information, you can use Elasticsearch in the backend to index data. The data needs to be large and complex enough to use Elasticsearch. Otherwise, it could be overkill as you can solve most basic problems via just in-memory/serialized data structures.
I tried to keep this explanation simple, but I'm starting to feel that I should write an article about how Elasticsearch / reverse-indexes work.
Started coding at the age of 13, now a professional software engineer and Scrum Master, creating and maintaining enterprise solutions. Eat - Sleep - Code - Lift - Repeat 💪🏾
Here are a couple of real-world examples:
Google Search: You enter search terms and it returns documents related to those terms ranked by relevance. There's of course more to Google Search, but ElasticSearch supports many of those algorithms and is a generic document search engine. It comes very close in terms of the supported features and scalability (hence the term Elastic).
Yelp Search: You enter search terms that match some facets (type of business, location, name of business, etc) and it returns a list of matches and additional details about it (address, number, ratings & reviews, etc.)
Pretty much any site where you can search for information, you can use Elasticsearch in the backend to index data. The data needs to be large and complex enough to use Elasticsearch. Otherwise, it could be overkill as you can solve most basic problems via just in-memory/serialized data structures.
I tried to keep this explanation simple, but I'm starting to feel that I should write an article about how Elasticsearch / reverse-indexes work.
You are right, I did not thought of existing search engines.
Also true that the data needs to be complex enough to not overkill it with Elasticsearch.
I would love to read your article about Elasticsearch indexing and reverse-indexes!