I work with Elasticsearch as a developer on a daily bases for textual search. It is the greatest tool I've used in years. Really like it.

It is just the best back end for search engines in the market. A NoSQL database that is trustworthy. Also, it is open source. Incredibly easy to use.

Mostly for developers: other people would have a hard time with it.

I am extremely satisfied with Elasticsearch, its speed & querying capabilities among lots of data amaze me!

The fact that Elasticsearch offers really efficient & quick querying of data without a compromise on the different range of queries it can support is really awesome, also Elasticsearch can rank matching documents based on matching criteria which is also very useful. Elasticsearch also handles distributed queries very efficiently.

Reindexing documents can be a real pain if there is a major change in the schema, otherwise no complaints.

Our overall experience with Swiftype was really negative. A big waste of our time and money. After waiting for them to follow up on our last conference call, we switched to Google Custom Search Engine. It turned out to be far less expensive than we thought. Swiftype is a bad investment if you have lots of files to be indexed but far fewer monthly searches. Google Custom Search now works well for us -- at a tiny fraction of Swiftype's annual cost.

1. It was fairly easy to set up. 2. It seemed to provide more accurate search results over time. 3. Customer service concerning technical questions was good.

1. Reports provided are too limited in time span covered to be helpful. 2. Company said number of documents we wanted indexed exceeded our quota and would result in higher cost at next renewal. This conflicted with our own records, so we repeatedly asked for a list of the pages being indexed. We got lots of emails and telephone conferences and promises, but we never got the list. 3. Swiftype seemed to have something to hide. We would talk with them about above indexing issue, and they said they would get back to us soon. But they didn't. They seemed to forget about us. I guess they were hoping we would just go away. 4. The last month or more, most of our searches were spam bot searches for non-existent domain names. This made our reports really worthless. (We have not had this problem anywhere else on our sites.)

Elasticsearch helps in performing optimised searching over the vast amount of data present in your system. The configuration for Elasticsearch can have some learning curve, but once setup completely, the indexed searches are really fast as compared to other basic solutions and helps users in searching your system from vast amount of data. Its ideal for Big data and can be used in other e-commerce solutions also. Text searching is really fast and helps your system in maintaining performance and scalability over search operations.

Elasticsearch is a great solution for implementing optimised searches over the data you have lying in your databases. The setup and configuration is a bit tricky, but once you have configured the data points and the indexes, the search is lighting fast. You can go for the complete text search or for the autocomplete bases suggestions which can help your users to quickly search for the right things in your system.

The setup of Elasticsearch does have a learning curve for the developers, but the documentation is really helpful in getting you over the curve. Setting up indexes or data points for search can be tricky. Elasticsearch needs to setup a more proactive customer support so that developers who are facing deadlines, can easily sort their issues with the help of tech support.

It's been great!

As a backend developer, I know for a fact that I can rely upon elasticsearch for all the times when I have to support search based on string across the database. You throw some set of documents to elasticseatch, and you are good to go to search anything amongst the provided documents. They have some supercool features to support string based search for say support for distributed systems, support for aggregations and analysers & folding, etc. The documentation out there makes it lot easier to get going with it :)

The memory optimisation related issues could be alarming sometimes if not taken care of properly. You may end up having some weird system crashes.