{
  "ok" : true,
  "status" : 200,
  "name" : "Gardener",
  "version" : {
    "number" : "0.19.8",
    "snapshot_build" : false
  },
  "tagline" : "You Know, for Search"
}

These lines of response from Elastic Search at http://localhost:9200 seems so nice. I smiled when I saw this response, and I said to my self: “Hack! Those guys at elastic search really solved a problem.

They defined a problem in their statements, and they solved the problem. Doing a lot of things should be easier and easier  – that is the thoughts of typical hacker. Why should I even need to download something to my server to run search? I may further ask the question. I believe some hacker out there will solve this problem.

You know, for Search

So, we build a web site or an application and want to add search to it, and then it hits us: getting search working is hard. We want our search solution to be fast, we want a painless setup and a completely free search schema, we want to be able to index data simply using JSON over HTTP, we want our search server to be always available, we want to be able to start with one machine and scale to hundreds, we want real-time search, we want simple multi-tenancy, and we want a solution that isbuilt for the cloud.

“This should be easier”, we declared, “and cool, bonsai cool”.

elasticsearch aims to solve all these problems and more. It is an Open Source (Apache 2), Distributed, RESTful, Search Engine built on top of Apache Lucene.

Company

Any company started with an observed problem in this world, and people in the company get excited about solving that problem. If they solve that problem, they created something people want, just like those guys created elastic search, which is what I and Xiaopai wanted.

If you create something people want, you are likely to be fine. People will take care of the monetization problems and others easier than creating something people want. I saw a good model in Elastic Search.

Value of Technology

New ways of doing things, like elastic search takes JSON as input and output, and adapted schema free, and NOSQL type of approach is new way to do search, and that works very well for me.

It is the technology that makes this world better (well, among many other great things), and I am happy to be still back to the technology world.