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This is a transcript of a talk I gave at the Singapore Java User Group on November 9 2016. It can also be seen as an updated version of an article with the same name I published in 2014 on the Found blog.
Relevancy, the notion that some results are better than others is one of the key factors that distinguishes search engines from most other databases. Additionaly it is a task that can sometimes seem like magic and is difficult to get right. Applications like Google have set the bar for how a search engine is expected to work. The relevant results should all be on the top positions. As the saying goes, if you want to make sure a secret stays a secret put it on page 3 of a Google search result page.
When it comes to data stores Java programmers are used to working with Java beans that are magically persisted. Solutions like Hibernate and the JPA specification for relational data stores or Morphia and Spring Data MongoDB are popular examples.
Last December I was holding the final printed version of my German book on Elasticsearch in my hands. It's a good feeling and though there were stressful times I don't regret writing it. In this very long post I'd like to talk about what it's like to write and publish a book the traditional way.
A while ago I was working on a prototype to search larger structured documents using Elasticsearch. We were only interested to make the text searchable, with an option to search all the text and some seperate fields. Elasticsearch is of course a perfect solution for this with the _all field and the possiblility to search single or multiple fields.