App Search documentation

ℹ️ The future of search projects with Elastic

We are actively developing new features and capabilities directly in Elasticsearch to help you build powerful search applications. For new users, we strongly recommend using our native Elasticsearch tools, rather than the standalone App Search product.

We have provided a comparison table below to help you understand the differences between the standalone product and our native Elasticsearch tools. We also added a recommendation wizard in the App Search product itself for new users.

For existing users, we’ve also created a an example Python notebook to help you migrate your App Search engines and configurations to Elasticsearch.

Table: App Search (standalone) and Elasticsearch

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Use the following table to compare the standalone App Search product feature set with the native Elasticsearch tools our team are actively developing.

	App Search (standalone product)	Elasticsearch tools
Overview	Out-of-the-box product. An opinionated solution developed as a user-friendly abstraction on top of Elasticsearch.	Flexible toolkit that works directly with Elasticsearch.
Product status	Supported	Active development
Indexing strategy	Content saved to hidden App Search indexes (managed, opinionated storage) under the "Engines" abstraction	Content saved to Elasticsearch indexes (flexible, familiar Elastic APIs)
User interface and search experience	Pre-built UI and search experience	Build your own customizable search experience using Elastic Search UI
Web crawler	Built-in web crawler	Try the new self-managed Elastic Open Web Crawler that writes directly to Elasticsearch indices
Search analytics	Built-in analytics	Track and analyze users' searching and clicking behavior with Behavioral Analytics
Search with synonyms	Built-in synonym management	Use the Elasticsearch Synonyms APIs to easily create and manage synonym sets
Relevance tuning	Built-in relevance tuning using GUI	Elasticsearch’s Query DSL provides a large set of relevance tools
Curate results	Built-in curation tools	Use Query Rules to customize your search results for queries that match specific criteria and metadata
Credentials and roles	Built-in user management	Elasticsearch provides a comprehensive set of security features, including document-level security and role-based access control
Source code	Closed code	Elasticsearch source code is open: GitHub repository
Machine Learning	Not easily combined with App Search Engines	Leverage all Elasticsearch ML and AI capabilities on your indices Learn more

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