Searching through texts and documents can be a real pain sometimes. Pouring over a huge wall of text, searching for that one word or sentence that you need to find. It can be a boring, tedious nightmare.
There are solutions, sure. But a lot of them can be pretty clunky and tedious themselves. That's where Elasticsearch comes in.
Elasticsearch is a search engine and indexer designed for exactly this kind of situation. Designed to search all kinds of documents, Elasticsearch is fast, easy, and (dare we say it?) fun to use.
But what actually is it? It's a document search engine, sure. But what does that actually mean? How do you use it? Read on for a comprehensive Elasticsearch tutorial that will answer all of your questions about this useful software.
What Is Elasticsearch?
Elasticsearch is a search engine, but not like most people think of. When most people hear the term search engine, they think of search engine services like Google, Bing, or Yahoo. If they're particularly savvy, maybe things like DuckDuckGo or other international search engines come to mind like Baidu and Yandex.
Elasticsearch isn't that kind of program. Those services search the web for results, matching searches to websites that match what the user is looking for. Elasticsearch is a search engine, but it searches text and documents for key words and phrases. It can also be used to index text as well.
What this means is that Elasticsearch is a search engine, but it's used more for finding data rather than larger results. Elasticsearch is constantly indexing raw data from different sources, compiling it into information that can be searched using keywords.
It's a complex process, but it's an efficient one, and it makes Elasticsearch flexible and easy to use. Don't just take my word for it, they explain it well themselves.
How Does it Work? An Elasticsearch Tutorial
Now that you know a little bit more about what Elasticsearch is, it's time we talked about how you actually use it, and what it's used for.
Let's get one thing out of the way right now; Elasticsearch is a much more technical tool than other search engines. It needs a decent understanding of scripting and data structures. If you don't have that, it's important to brush up on these concepts.
Elasticsearch mostly functions using a stack system. In computer structures, a stack is a type of data storage. The basic concept is to think of it as, well, a stack. Like a stack of papers in real life. Data is added, and as it's added data is removed as needed to open up storage space.
When we start using Elasticsearch, we first have to set up our deployment. This is basically a fancy way of saying we have to define the parameters for our session. This involves giving it a name, establishing our cloud platform (Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud), and selecting the demographic region.
After this, we determine our optimization for the session. This allows us to tell Elasticsearch exactly what we're trying to accomplish, which in turn allows it to modify its behavior to give us the best possible results for what we're trying to do.
For example, if I'm using Elasticsearch for something that requires a lot of available memory, I can choose that optimization. This will ensure that Elasticsearch runs as memory-light as possible. If I'm just going for a general session, I/O, or Input-Output, would be the best optimization. This ensures that the program runs the smoothest on the user end, without worrying about deeper optimization.
This is the basic gist of setting up a session with Elasticsearch. Now that we've got things up and running, we're going to take a deeper look at some of the functionality available through the program.
What Can I Do With Elasticsearch?
Once an Elasticsearch instance has been created, it's time to get started in our session.
When we're using Elasticsearch, we're going to be doing so mostly through a console, or a text window, where we will input our various commands. From here, we can tell Elasticsearch what exactly we're trying to find, and what we want to do with it.
One of our most basic commands is a query, or a GET command. When we type this in, we're telling Elasticsearch that we want to find anything that matches whatever we put into the command.
You can modify all of the aspects of the query by expanding the command, adding parameters for things like string length, location, and range of results. You can tell it to begin searching up to a certain result, or after a certain result is found. And these are just the basic applications. With a little experimentation, we can use the console to get basically any result we need.
One of Elasticsearch's main uses is for online analytics. It is a great tool for scanning across the web, looking for demographic information. Elasticsearch comes with its own built-in analytics software, called Kibana.
However, if we want to expand our options for Elasticsearch analytics, we can do that as well. One of the strengths of Elasticsearch is that it is scalable and modular, which means that we can add or remove functionality as we need to.
These are just some of the different ways we can make use of Elasticsearch. With a little creativity, the console is your oyster. The tools available are flexible and powerful.
Get Started With Elasticsearch Today
If you have need of data storage, indexing, or analytic services in your work, look no further than Elasticsearch. It's a powerful, flexible tool that has become a leading player in its field.
It can be daunting when first starting out. Hopefully our Elasticsearch tutorial helped shed some light on the basic features of the program, and how best to use them.
So download Elasticsearch today, and start using it in your work. Whatever you use it for, we're confident you'll find it to be a powerful tool.
