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Databases & search
Search engine
Inverted-index store for full-text, faceted and geo search.
When to use
- Product, listing, video or user search
- Autocomplete
Pitfalls
- Eventually consistent with the source of truth; feed it via events or CDC
Options by provider
The first option is what diagrams show for that provider.
Amazon Web Services
- Amazon OpenSearch ServiceManaged
Google Cloud
- Vertex AI SearchManaged
- Elastic Cloud on Google CloudManaged
Microsoft Azure
- Azure AI SearchManaged
Open source / self-hosted
- ElasticsearchSelf-hosted
- OpenSearchSelf-hosted
- Apache SolrSelf-hosted
- MeilisearchSelf-hosted
Related concepts
Used in
- YouTube
- Search index — Full-text index over titles, descriptions and tags
- Instagram
- Search index — Users and hashtags
- Twitter / X
- Search index — Recent tweets by term and hashtag
- Amazon
- Search index — Products by text and facets
- Web crawler
- Search index — Downstream consumer of crawled text
- Google Maps
- Places index — Places and addresses with geo fields
- BookMyShow
- Search index — Movies, events and venues
- MakeMyTrip
- Hotel index — Hotel content for filtering and ranking
- Airbnb
- Listing index — Listings with geo point and amenities
- NoBroker
- Listing index — Live listings with geo points
- Zomato / food delivery
- Restaurant index — Restaurants with location, cuisine, rating
- Practo / teleconsultation
- Doctor index — Doctors, clinics and next free slot
- Quora
- Question index — Questions and answers by text
- LinkedIn
- People & jobs index — Members and job postings