And it all started with Shay Banon attempting to build a cooking app for his wife who was a chef.
> JAXenter: You started Compass, your first Lucene-based technology, in 2004. Do you remember how and why you became interested in Lucene in the first place?
> Shay Banon: Reminiscing on Compass birth always puts a smile on my face. Compass, and my involvement with Lucene, started by chance. At the time, I was a newlywed that just moved to London to support my wife with her dream of becoming a chef. I was unemployed, and desperately in need of a job, so I decided to play around with “new age” technologies in order to get my skills more uptodate. Playing around with new technologies only works when you are actually trying to build something, so I decided to build an app that my wife could use to capture all the cooking knowledge she was gathering during her chef lessons.
> I picked many different technologies for this cooking app, but at the core of it, in my mind, was a single search box where the cooking knowledge experience would start a single box where typing a concept, a thought, or an ingredient would start the path towards exploring what was possible.
> This quickly led me to Lucene, which was the defacto search library available for Java at the time. I got immersed in it, and Compass was born out of the effort of trying to simplify using Lucene in your typical Java applications (conceptually, it simply started as a “Hibernate” (Java ORM library) for Lucene).
> I got completely hooked with the project, and was working on it more than the cooking app itself, up to a point where it was taking most of my time. I decided to open source it a few months afterwards, and it immediately took off. Compass basically allowed users to easily map their domain model (the code that maps app/business concepts in a typical program) to Lucene, easily index them, and then easily search them.
> That freedom caused people to start to use Compass, and Lucene, in situations that were wonderfully unexpected. Imagine already having the model of a Trade in your financial app, one could easily index that Trade using Compass into Lucene, and then search for it. The freedom of searching across any aspect of a Trade allowed users to convey this freedom to their users, which proved to be an extremely powerful concept.
> Effectively, this allowed me to be in the front seat of talking and working with actual users that were discovering, as was I, the amazing power that search can have when it comes to delivering business value to their users. Oh, and btw, my wife is still waiting for that cooking app. Now, 10 years later, it is the basis of Elasticsearch.
https://jaxenter.com/elasticsearch-founder-interview-112677....