Elastic App Search: A free product for building great search experiences
Wherever people encounter a search bar — whether on Google, phone apps, or while shopping online — they're conditioned to expect search experiences that deliver fast and relevant results. With this ever-evolving expectation in mind, millions of developers and organizations have chosen Elasticsearch for building powerful content discovery experiences over the years, to the great delight of their audience and user base. After seeing how teams leverage Elasticsearch in the context of full-text search, we built Elastic App Search — a free product that makes the process of rolling out modern search experiences using Elasticsearch simpler than ever.
The motivation behind App Search is multi-faceted. First and foremost, we consistently invest in making our products easier to use, and App Search is exhibit A: by offering out-of-the-box typo-tolerant searches, pre-tuned multi-lingual relevance, and a powerful administrative dashboard, we shortcut a substantial portion of work without sacrificing flexibility.
Another motivation is our core belief that you shouldn't have to become a search expert in order to create great search experiences. With App Search we aim to democratize access to powerful, modern search experiences — not just for developers, but for the many website administrators, support specialists, and marketing teams that often operate in less technically oriented environments.
Why make App Search free?
Businesses and their customers suffer without good search. It is central to our daily lives now; we shop online, browse for a solution on a support site, look for a place to eat, or search for critical information on a local government website. As the information we use is increasingly consumed digitally, the need for great search in a variety of scenarios evolves along with it.
The upfront cost of proprietary software is prohibitive in many cases, especially if the scope of a project is unclear, or the use case is an innovative experiment. The free and open model of our software removes the burden of selecting it. Our users have adopted the Elastic Stack for this reason for years, avoiding the headaches that often accompany proprietary software, and — crucially — enjoying the benefits of software that scales to fit their own needs, not ours. We have brought this same philosophy to Elastic App Search, enabling our users to adopt it easily and adapt it to fit the needs of businesses both large and small.
What is Elastic App Search?
App Search is a free product that runs alongside Elasticsearch and simplifies the process of building rich search experiences. It comes expertly tuned and provides fully configured, production-ready implementations of key features of Elasticsearch: out-of-the-box implementations for fast autocomplete, typo tolerance, faceting and filtering, and highly relevant results. Beyond these core features, App Search packs a powerful administrative dashboard that assists you during the development process and later helps you customize your search engine through powerful relevance customization and detailed analytics, all collected automatically.
With turnkey features like relevance tuning, synonyms, and curations, search and content managers can adjust the default algorithmic behavior with an intuitive point-and-click interface — so your search can adapt to a changing world with no coding required. Similarly, App Search’s built-in analytics transform users’ search behavior into actionable data points for relevance and engagement, with no surprise add-on.
We’ve also invested significant effort into free and open developer tools that complement App Search. These include our Search UI JavaScript library as well as the native API Clients that are available in many popular languages. Search UI brings our efforts to simplify your development process all the way to your front-end code — enabling you to add JavaScript-powered UI components, such as an autocomplete dropdown or search filter — with ease.
Big things start small
Whether big or small, your projects should consider great search a given. App Search lets you focus on solving your own problem, armed with a powerful and rich search experience. Prohibitive pricing only hampers innovation: success comes from technologies that support it early rather than get in the way. The small proof of concept you start today may someday become the cornerstone of your company.
The engine of search
At the core of everything we do at Elastic is Elasticsearch, the world’s leading open source search engine. Elasticsearch is designed for speed, scale, and relevance, and making it the core foundational technology of App Search allows us to leverage those strengths while still creating a more turnkey experience for our users.
Our goal remains as it always was: making great search accessible to all. Which is why Elastic App Search is available as a free download for you to install and manage on your own infrastructure, or to deploy on Elastic Cloud, where our resource-based pricing model charges you only for the underlying server resources you consume.
Try it for yourself
Download and run Elastic App Search for free, or spin up the latest release, hosted on the cloud platform of your choice, with a 14-day free trial of Elastic Cloud. Engage with a passionate community of Elastic App Search users on our Discuss forum, and tell us what you think. We’re excited to see what you create.