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In this post we’re covering a range of the best reasons why you should consider using Elasticsearch for your business or website.
We’ve brought together some of our favourite experts working in eCommerce and Technology to let us know why they love using Elasticsearch for their projects & why they would recommend this powerful search engine.
Contents
Why Should You Use Elasticsearch?
Two of the biggest reasons for using Elasticsearch were detailed by Usama Raudo, Marketing Strategist at Within The Flow.
Scalability:
“Elasticsearch is able to run with one node only, and more nodes can be added accordingly”.
“This allows scalability of clusters on your website especially if you're a fast growing eCommerce website.”
Schema Free:
“Elasticsearch provides its users with the opportunity to load a regular JSON object, which indexes all the information by itself along with the inclusion of data from the search database.”
When asked for his comments on this subject, Andrew Ruditser, Co-Founder & Lead Technology Coordinator at MaxBurst was more than happy to go into detail about why businesses should consider using Elasticsearch;
“Elasticsearch allows you to search enormous volumes of data very quickly and easily by searching an index rather than the text directly.”
“This is because as Elasticsearch is on the server end, it allows for 'search' to hook up to the database rather than going through Wordpress first, allowing for a greater search speed.”
“Compared to its competitor platforms, Elasticsearch has numerous built in features that allow you to make searching and storing data much more efficient.” “Because Elasticsearch is distributed by nature this allows the search platform to escalate to hundreds and even thousands of servers to gather information and pick up petabytes of data.”
When Should You Use Elasticsearch?
Jack Zmudzinski, Senior Associate at Future Processing moved to using Elasticsearch for his projects when their client’s product inventory grew in size and needed to be indexed intelligently. He expanded on this in his comment;
“I’ve used Elasticsearch on my website for a while now as it’s vital that my customers are able to quickly search - and find - what they’re looking for on my extensive product base.”
“For this reason, anybody dealing with a large variety of products really needs to be getting on board with this little known search engine.”
“Elasticsearch is an NoSQL distributed database which makes for super quick searching and, it uses Lucene Standard Analyser for indexing for automatic type guessing; providing superior precision.”
Elasticsearch Benefits
When asked for his comments around the benefits of Elasticsearch, Rorie Devine, one of Tech Target’s UKTech50 & CTO of GRO.TEAM responded with the following;
Fuzzy Search:
“This is a semantic way to determine the buyers' intent, rather than just concentrating on keywords (as is the approach for most e-commerce shopping carts out of the box).”
“This could suggest synonyms, spell-correction and field boosting. Collectively, these can be thought of as a ‘Did You Mean?’ experience.”
Faceting/Filtering:
“Almost everyone has witnessed the experience. Category drill-downs on the left, product search results on the right.”
“These categories can be nested hierarchically. Not everyone utilizes facets, but those that do are 3x more likely to be buyers than those that don't.” Speed: “Most shopping carts use MySQL or another relational database out of the box.”
“These are powerful and free but can be slow, especially if your product catalog is in the tens of thousands.”
“Every tenth of a second counts in e-commerce, though, so having your product catalog cached can provide a real boost to conversions.”
Jack also seconded speed as a benefit in his response;
Superior Data Management:
“Elasticsearch retrieves search query data in microseconds - as opposed to about 10 seconds for traditional SQL database management systems.”
In addition to these Anthony Mixides, Managing Director at London Vape added a few more benefits he had found from using Elasticsearch previously;
Geo-search:
“Features such as store locators, or tagging users in your vicinity are made possible by using Elasticsearch.”
Log Analysis & Other Analytics Capabilities:
“The possibilities are endless, but your data may provide highly valuable insights.”
“Elasticsearch is a great tool for unlocking these insights”
Find out more about how Elasticsearch forms a key role in log analysis,log viewing, container monitoring & see how Logit.io provides it’s users with hosted Elasticsearch, Logstash & Kibana.
End Notes
If you’ve not yet found a suitable platform providing Elasticsearch then you might want to consider hosted Elasticsearch from Logit.io.
Get the most out of Elasticsearch and it’s complementary tools, Logstash and Kibana by using an affordable, cloud native service such as Logit.io. Spare your business from the hiring and training costs associated with dedicated Elasticsearch engineers and get started with your first Stack within minutes by using our platform.
Get started with our free 14 day free trial to see how hosted Elasticsearch & ELK as a Service can help revolutionise your business.
If you enjoyed this post on the benefits of using Elasticsearch then why not check out our post on how can you make a text field in Elasticsearch aggregatable or our guide comparing Kibana vs Grafana.