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Elasticsearch: The Definitive Guide [2.x] » Getting Started
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Getting Startededit

Elasticsearch is a real-time distributed search and analytics engine. It allows you to explore your data at a speed and at a scale never before possible. It is used for full-text search, structured search, analytics, and all three in combination:

  • Wikipedia uses Elasticsearch to provide full-text search with highlighted search snippets, and search-as-you-type and did-you-mean suggestions.
  • The Guardian uses Elasticsearch to combine visitor logs with social -network data to provide real-time feedback to its editors about the public’s response to new articles.
  • Stack Overflow combines full-text search with geolocation queries and uses more-like-this to find related questions and answers.
  • GitHub uses Elasticsearch to query 130 billion lines of code.

But Elasticsearch is not just for mega-corporations. It has enabled many startups like Datadog and Klout to prototype ideas and to turn them into scalable solutions. Elasticsearch can run on your laptop, or scale out to hundreds of servers and petabytes of data.

No individual part of Elasticsearch is new or revolutionary. Full-text search has been done before, as have analytics systems and distributed databases. The revolution is the combination of these individually useful parts into a single, coherent, real-time application. It has a low barrier to entry for the new user, but can keep pace with you as your skills and needs grow.

If you are picking up this book, it is because you have data, and there is no point in having data unless you plan to do something with it.

Unfortunately, most databases are astonishingly inept at extracting actionable knowledge from your data. Sure, they can filter by timestamp or exact values, but can they perform full-text search, handle synonyms, and score documents by relevance? Can they generate analytics and aggregations from the same data? Most important, can they do this in real time without big batch-processing jobs?

This is what sets Elasticsearch apart: Elasticsearch encourages you to explore and utilize your data, rather than letting it rot in a warehouse because it is too difficult to query.

Elasticsearch is your new best friend.

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