ZincSearch: An Alternative to Elasticsearch

December 16, 2022

Recently launched ZincSearch is an Elasticsearch alternative worth looking into, despite the fact that several features are not yet fully formed. The nascent enterprise search engine promises lower complexity and lower costs. The About Us page describes its edge search and an experimental stateless server that can be scaled horizontally. The home page emphasizes:

“ZincSearch is built for Full Text Search: ZincSearch is a search engine that can be used for any kind of text data. It can be used for logs, metrics, events, and more. It allows you to do full text search among other things. e.g. Send server logs to ZincSearch for them or you can push your application data and provide full text search or you can build a search bar in your application using ZincSearch.

Easy to Setup & Operate: ZincSearch provides the easiest way to get started with log capture, search and analysis. It has simple APIs to interact and integrates with leading log forwarders allowing you to get operational in minutes.
Low resource requirements: It uses far less CPU and RAM compared to alternatives allowing for lower cost to run. Developers can even run it on their laptops without ever noticing its resource utilization. …
Schemaless Indexes: No need to work hard to define schema ahead of time. ZincSearch automatically discovers schema so you can focus on search and analysis.
Aggregations: Do faceted search and analyze your data.”

ZincSearch would not attract many conversions if it made migration difficult, so of course it is compatible with the Elasticsearch API. To a point, anyway—the application is still working on an Elasticsearch-compatible query API. ZincSearch can store data in S3 and MinIO, though that capacity is currently in an experimental phase. Sounds promising; we look forward to seeing how ZincSearch looks a year or so from now.

A blog post by ZincSearch creator Prabhat Sharma not only discusses his reasons for making his solution but also gives a useful summary of enterprise search in general. The startup is based in San Francisco.

Cynthia Murrell, December 16, 2022

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under News, Search

Comments

Comments are closed.

Search the site
Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive

Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.