Elasticsearch: Build full-text search for modern applications

Elasticsearch delivers distributed, high‑performance full text search for modern applications. Combining speed, scale, and relevance, it powers everything from product and ecommerce search to document and application data retrieval — on a platform developers love and enterprises trust.

Start free trial

Search that scales — from thousands to billions of records

Elasticsearch delivers millisecond‑latency search performance across massive datasets using an inverted index and distributed architecture. Whether you’re handling structured metadata or unstructured content, Elasticsearch indexes and retrieves relevant matches with precision and speed.

  • Real-time retrieval

    Perform lexical search with precise relevance scoring via BM25.

  • Horizontal scalability

    Scale out across nodes with automatic sharding and replication and no downtime.

  • Hybrid search ready

    Use the Retrievers API to natively combine structured metadata, text, and vector embeddings in a single request.

  • Multi‑cloud deployment

    Deploy across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud to align with existing cloud strategies and scale search where your applications run.

Scalable search for critical use cases

Elasticsearch supports a variety of text search workloads out of the box — from basic site search to advanced hybrid models that blend semantics and syntax.

Ecommerce and product discovery

Search large catalogs with autocomplete, typo tolerance, and natural language queries for highly relevant product results.

How Elasticsearch works

Elasticsearch transforms text into an efficient data structure called an inverted index, mapping terms to document locations so retrieval is blazing fast.

  • Index

    Index your data (structured, unstructured, or JSON).

  • Analyze

    Analyze text with custom pipelines.

  • Query

    Query using piped ES|QL or expressive DSL to find and transform the most relevant matches.

  • Retrieve

    Retrieve relevant results instantly.

Advanced features that make Elastic unbeatable

Elasticsearch doesn't just match keywords — it understands and ranks them.

  • Elasticsearch bridges keyword search, contextual semantics, and vector embeddings in one platform, enabling truly relevant results even when queries don’t directly match text.

  • Transform data with ES|QL

    Use our piped query language to search, filter, and transform text data in a single expression. ES|QL simplifies complex lookups and provides a more intuitive way to process results at query time.

  • Rich text analysis

    Customizable analyzers break text into meaningful tokens, support stemming, synonyms, and stop‑word filtering — enabling deeper understanding than simple search.

  • Flexible query DSL

    Use powerful full‑text queries like match, multi_match, match_phrase, and more to express nuanced user intent.

  • Aggregations and filtering

    Build faceted search experiences with real-time filters, counts, and insights alongside text search results.

  • Search by location, map distances, and geofence queries without sacrificing text relevance.

Customer success highlights

  • Customer spotlight

    Yatego: Scaled product text search for 5 million products and delivered search results 100× faster than previous solutions

    Explore case study

  • Customer spotlight

    LG CNS: Combined full‑text and hybrid search to boost search accuracy from 75 % to 95 % and reduce response times 
    Explore case study

  • Customer spotlight

    Shopify: Provides industry-leading support services and documentation using Elastic as a powerful search engine
    Explore case study

  • Customer spotlight

    Cypris: Leveraged hybrid search for richer, context‑aware search results beyond keyword matches

    Explore case study

  • Customer Spotlight

    Docusign: Uses Elasticsearch to search billions of documents, enabling fast access to agreements across platforms
    Explore case study