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Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

Starting with ES is not easy. The documentation index is confusing. The basic examples that I saw only showed half of the equation: searching. And that example left out a lot of typical use cases without links to any examples for implementing those use cases.

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."

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I am a Solr specialist (and author www.packtpub.com/apache-solr-for-indexing-data/book ), but usually the comments I see about Elastic Search is that it is _easy_ to get started with. Then, it gets a lot more complex (and so does Solr). But I haven't done the study myself to have a strong opinion.

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.

I figured out what I needed to know about ElasticSearch. But that doesn't mean that I shouldn't complain about it. More people need to complain.

My biggest difficulty with the documentation is the lack of examples and a logical layout. That's why at our company (we do hosted ES), we decided to invest in a new documentation portal ala Stripe: http://www.silota.com/docs/api/

Hope you find that useful. Any feedback is appreciated!

Is Silota based on Lucene (or ES or Solr)? Because you don't seem to mention it. And if it is not, there is not enough information to make an informed choice. I don't see any information on tokenization nor does your own site seems to have a search engine to check (dogfood?).

Never mind. Seems to have missed (hosted ES) point. I would make frankly make that (or at least Lucene mention) a selling point as opposed to a buried one. That way people who actually know what to look for in a search engine know what's under the covers.

Good feedback. Still iterating on the messaging – at this stage, we are still figuring out how to describe the product.

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...

I agree. Searching is actually the easy part. Setting up a distributed cluster, allocating shards, replicas, rebalancing , etc is the hard part.

And that's supposed to be the hard part. There are no workaround for the hard parts. You need to understand the complex issues involved. However, you may want to read the blog from Found.no, they have a lot of great material: https://www.found.no/foundation/

Clustering Solr is even harder. I would say that, once you know what you're doing, ES makes this much easier.

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