Simon Willison’s Weblog

elasticsearch: Percolator. Another fascinating elasticsearch feature: Percolator lets you register searches with your elasticsearch cluster, then pass in a document and have the matching query IDs returned. It’s an upside down search engine. I’m sure there are some very neat things you could build with this, I just haven’t figured out what they are just yet. 8th February 2011, 11:16 pm

ElasticSearch memcached module. Fascinating idea: the ElasticSearch search server provides an optional memcached protocol plugin for added performance which maps simple HTTP to memcached. GET is mapped to memcached get commands, POST is mapped to set commands. This means you can use any memcached client to communicate with the search server. 15th May 2010, 10:17 am

Search Engine Time Machine. Detailed explanation of how ElasticSearch provides high availability, through clever sharding and replication strategies and configurable gateways for long-term persistent storage. 17th February 2010, 10:32 pm

ElasticSearch: Your Data, Your Search. A neat example of how ElasticSearch’s schemaless indexes and native JSON support make it ridiculously easy to index different types of data and run queries across them. 12th February 2010, 3:22 pm

Elastic Search (via) Solr has competition! Like Solr, Elastic Search provides a RESTful JSON HTTP interface to Lucene. The focus here is on distribution, auto-sharding and high availability. It’s even easier to get started with than Solr, partly due to the focus on providing a schema-less document store, but it’s currently missing out on a bunch of useful Solr features (a web interface and faceting are the two that stand out). The high availability features look particularly interesting. UPDATE: I was incorrect, basic faceted queries are already supported. 11th February 2010, 6:33 pm