What do Uber, Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix, The New York Times and Goldman Sachs have in common? They all make use of the software from the Dutch company Elastic. The in Amsterdam based company Elastic is founded in 2012 and creates search technology, which they call “ElasticSearch”.
ElasticSearch goes through large amounts of data sets, even though those data sets are scattered around hundreds different servers. ElasticSearch can be compared with Google. Where Google is indexing web pages, ElasticSearch analyses data sets to discover valuable information. Elastic created a database that can detect trends in large amounts of data. There is an enormous demand for these kind of services from companies. Most companies collect a lot of data, but have no idea what to do with it. Let’s look at some examples. Goldman Sachs uses ElasticSearch to analyse stock market transactions and it helps readers of the The New York Times to search for newspaper articles.
Is Google not in the same business? Yes they do, but ElasticSearch can search better. It also outperforms search engine services Amazon and Microsoft. In February 2015, they surpassed their rival Solr as the most popular search engine. Since then, ElasticSearch is the most popular search engine for businesses.
What makes ElasticSearch so special compared to Google?
The difference is that ElasticSearch was specifically designed to scale across hundreds of thousands of servers. Elasticsearch is opensource, Google not. Anybody is welcome to submit improvements to the ElasticSearch code base. But still, this open source challenger is years behind Google’s public search engine. Another huge benefit of ElasticSearch is the support of roughly all the programming languages.
ElasticSearch offers its software for free and asks money for extensions. This makes is easy for new users to learn the software. According to one of the founders of Elastic, Steven Schuurman, developpers fall in love with our free software and join our community. As a result, Elastic is now established in Australia, South Korea, Japan, Hongkong, Singapore and China.
They support twice as many languages than Google does! Not such a bad idea to launch an open source platform!! What do you think, will ElasticSearch retain its number one position in a market that evolves by the day? And will this Elastic ever have a chance to beat Google in the public search engine market? Or should it just focus on its solutions for businesses?
Sources:
NRC Next (2016) ‘Zoeken als Google, maar dan beter’, 9 oktober 2016: p. 2. of the economic section
http://db-engines.com/en/system/Elasticsearch%3BGoogle+Cloud+Bigtable%3BGoogle+Cloud+Datastore, retrieved on October 15th 2016
http://db-engines.com/en/ranking/search+engine, retrieved on October 15th 2016
https://www.wired.com/2012/12/solar-elasticsearch-google/, retrieved on October 16th 2016
