And the Solr community gets its income from all sorts of direction. So, the user mailing list is quite helpful.
So what you are suggesting, that I should use Solr since the Elasticsearch documentation is difficult to navigate or perhaps incomplete, is almost like saying "I think it should be difficult to figure out how to use ElasticSearch, since its so powerful, its not for kids. Therefore, the documentation is deliberately opaque. If you want something easy, use Solr."
Hope you find that useful. Any feedback is appreciated!
When you begin incorporating ES into your application, roughly you’d be thinking about: 1. Figuring out the structure of your data and translating that into ES’s mapping 2. Learning the query syntax (the ES docs assume you already know Lucene, not usually the case.) 3. Setup an ingest workflow and keeping your indexed data in sync 4. Securing your cluster if you want to hit ES directly from the browser/API client 5. Maintaining your cluster
Silota attempts to solve 3, 4, 5. Improving documentation helps with 2.
There’s an e-commerce search example here: http://www.silota.com/docs/api/ecommerce-product-search-exam...
Still, if you have trouble, then yes, try Solr. They have a tutorial that walks you through the full example. Perhaps that will get you going faster.
If you are not picking ES because of a particular feature set, pick on whatever criteria you feel makes it more user-friendly. Whether ElasticSearch or Solr, you are benefiting from Lucene library underneath. I would think twice about any other non-Lucene based search engine at this stage of the search game.