One User Finds Some Flaws in Elasticsearch
August 18, 2014
We are jazzed about Elasticsearch. Our own search expert Stephen E. Arnold, who has been yearning for some real innovation in search for years now, recently declared, “I will be telling those who attend my lectures to go with Elasticsearch. That’s where the developers and the money are.” Personally, I’m inclined to go with the search expert here (though I admit I may be a bit biased.) This declaration is just to preface my reaction to a post at Sammaye’s Blog, “Things I Have Learnt in the First 5 Minutes of Using Elastic Search.” Apparently, how to spell the name correctly was not one of those things.
Still, it looks like programmer Sam Millman (aka Sammaye) may have some good points. For example, he describes the querying as “the most verbose in the universe,” balks at the requirement to define indexes client-side, and claims Lucene is a bad platform on which to base search in the first place. He also calls the documentation terrible, and bad documentation happens to be a pet peeve of mine. (I’ve written documentation. If you must supply it, you might as well make it comprehensive, organized, and well-written. It’s not that difficult.) Millman explains:
“Its documentation is great at explaining the API, no doubt about it but if you want to actually find out how something works and why something is then you have to constantly ask StackOverflow. It just describes what parameters to put in and then leaves the rest up to you thinking that you don’t want to bother yourself with those details. We do though, we are not bandwagoning your product, we want to know how sharding and replication works, how indexes work and how to manage the product and more. Even when looking at the API the documentation can sometimes be…unhelpful. Mainly due to its huge font-size, yet tiny middle centered layout, English language problems and disorganisation. Overall I came out less than impressed about Elastic Searches documentation. I actually Google search everything first so I don’t have to navigate that mess.”
So, perhaps Elasticsearch is not perfect. See the article for Millman’s full roster of complaints. However, if Arnold is correct and this is “where the developers and the money are” right now, vexing problems should be fixed in short order. It would be a mistake to not take Elasticsearch seriously. Formed in 2012, the company is based in Amsterdam with offices in the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, and Switzerland. They are also hiring as of this writing, in case anyone here wants to help them iron out some wrinkles.
Cynthia Murrell, August 18, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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