How to search a large database of documents?

Question

Search engines

Good afternoon!

We are going to make a search engine for a large database of text documents. Several million pieces.
Search requirements:
- self-learning search suggestions
- smart ranking of results
- high response speed

Ideally, we would like everything to be hosted by us (planned by DigitalOcean). Therefore, the main candidate now is Elasticsearch.
But we also look at algolia.com, amazon cloudsearch. As I understand it, algolia has a lot of delicious things right out of the box, and the elastic needs to be decently cut and tuned .

Tell me, please, in which direction to look? Would elastic be the best choice? Or is it better to take algolia and a monthly fee, for example, $1k will be significantly cheaper than a cluster for elastic + admin?

Answer 1

Elastic for search is almost always a good solution, but if you have money for algolia, then at least at the start it is better to take it. You need to know how to cook elastic, and there appear many interesting processes with the transformation of the data schema. And yes, if you find such a cheap admin who knows how to keep something on par with Algolia .... success in general)