Elasticsearch
Definition.
Elasticsearch: A search engine based on the Lucene library, providing a distributed, multitenant-capable full-text search engine with an HTTP web interface.
In More Detail
Elasticsearch is built for text: fuzzy matching, typo tolerance, relevance scoring, and faceted filtering across large document sets. Those are things a relational database does awkwardly at best.
It is also another service to run, secure, monitor, and keep in sync with your source of truth — and that sync is where bugs live. PostgreSQL's built-in full-text search with a GIN index covers a surprising amount of ground, so I reach for it first and only move to a dedicated search service when the query patterns clearly outgrow it.
In Practice
I reach for this only once PostgreSQL's built-in full-text search genuinely can't keep up — for most projects under a few hundred thousand records, Postgres search is simpler to operate and one less service to keep running.
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If you are working out whether this applies to your own project, the case studies show where it turned up in real builds, services lists what I take on, and pricing gives the starting figures.
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