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Ask HN: Why should I use Elasticsearch instead of building from scratch
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Re: Ask HN: Why should I use Elasticsearch instead of building from scratch
#2Have you written a search engine from scratch before? There's a reason this is still a primary field for PhD work.
Re: Ask HN: Why should I use Elasticsearch instead of building from scratch
#3To leverage the thousands of hours that went into it.
Re: Ask HN: Why should I use Elasticsearch instead of building from scratch
#4You should write one from scratch to get a deeper understanding of how hard it is to return highly relevant results quickly. Tokenizing, stemming, bag of words, and tf-idf for ranking get you to an MVP, but then you realize how good production grade search engines are today.
Solr is good. I've been wanting to try Lunr [1] for small sites.
Re: Ask HN: Why should I use Elasticsearch instead of building from scratch
#5Is this for work, and is search a competitive advantage for you? If not, snap in Elasticsearch and spend your time on your differentiators.
Re: Ask HN: Why should I use Elasticsearch instead of building from scratch
#6what a weird question: who looks at a search engine and thinks yea hm that's trivial enough i could do it myself in a weekend?
Re: Ask HN: Why should I use Elasticsearch instead of building from scratch
#7With that little information from the OP the answer is probably: Use ES or if it's a small side project use your DB's included full text search if it's good enough.
Re: Ask HN: Why should I use Elasticsearch instead of building from scratch
#8Elasticsearch is incredibly deep, and highly performant. If all you need is simple full text search then rolling your own can be an interesting exercise, but I can't imagine the amount of hours it would take to replicate the features I use on a daily basis.
Re: Ask HN: Why should I use Elasticsearch instead of building from scratch
#9Tough to answer w/o more info. FWIW, I've used Lucene, Solr, and Elasticsearch and have ended up settling on Lucene being the best interface for me.
Re: Ask HN: Why should I use Elasticsearch instead of building from scratch
#10With that little information from the OP the answer is probably: Use ES or if it's a small side project use your DB's included full text search if it's good enough.
You can go far using purely Postgres full text search. I ported a site from Solr to PG full text because of strange syncing issues and it was just as fast.
Afterwards I never really saw the point of any of the search systems other than elastic search because the streaming capabilities that it gives you.