Kyle Jensen

Elasticsearch is a Java application and set of shell scripts that makes it nearly trivial to add full-text search to your web application. It’s powered by Apache Lucene, but its got a significantly lower barrier-to-entry as you can see from the intro slides.

I could extoll numerous virtues of Elasticsearch, but there’s one I think is particularly cool: you get a full query syntax language out of the box. So, for example, you can allow your users to do searches of your documents like “+monkey +ape -gorilla” or “cheese AND crackers OR pickles” without having to parse the query yourself. However, I could not figure out how to do multiple field full-text search using elasticsearch until some helpful soul in the #elasticsearch IRC channel told me: you need to wrap it in a boolean query. So, if I have documents with “abstract” and “title” fields and a corresponding web form into which a user submits ‘Kyle AND “body odor”’ and ‘heat OR wave’ (respectively) I’d translate that into the elasticsearch JSON search syntax as follows:

1 2 

That’s it. Super cool. Super easy. Using elasticsearch’s boolean query you could designed monstrous “advanced search” forms in a flash.