Developers can now easily build amazing search experiences straight into their applications with the Elastic App Search extension for Google Cloud Firestore.

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Accelerate search experiences with Elastic App Search and Google Firebase

Accelerate search experiences with Elastic App Search and Google Cloud Firestore

See how to secure your Elastic Enterprise Search deployment by using a SAML identity provider (IdP) — in this case, we’ll be using Okta — for cross-domain, single sign-on (SSO) authentication.

<p>In this post, we’ll show how you can secure your Elastic Enterprise Search deployment by using a Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) identity provider (IdP) — in this case, we’ll be using <a href="https://developer.okta.com/docs/concepts/saml/">Okta</a> — for cross-domain, single sign-on authentication. IdPs are responsible for confirming that a user is who they say are, and then sending that data (and the user’s access rights) to a service provider — in this case to Elastic.
</p><h2>Get your cluster going with SAML on Elastic Cloud</h2><p>To get started, you’ll need the Enterprise Search endpoint (we’ll refer to that as the <code>[ENTERPRISE SEARCH ENDPOINT]</code>): You can find it in the Deployment details in the <a href="https://cloud.elastic.co/">Elastic Cloud console</a>. Select <strong>Copy endpoint</strong> next to Enterprise Search. Note that Elastic Cloud appends <code>/login</code> to the end of this URL — please make sure to remove it for all the links shown below.
</p><p>You’ll begin by setting up your application in Okta. Then you’ll adjust a few settings to enable SAML on Enterprise Search.
</p><h2>Okta: Set up your application</h2><p>First you’ll work within Okta to add Enterprise Search as an app integration.
</p><ol>
	<li>To create a new app, choose <strong>Add Application &gt; Create New App</strong>.<br>
	If you don’t see the option, you may have to switch to <strong>Classic UI</strong> using the upper-left menu.
	</li>
	<p><img class="shadow" src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt829c74a2f2abad50/601ac06bf13a6d4c0c25622f/saml-okta-classic-ui-blog.png" data-sys-asset-uid="blt829c74a2f2abad50" alt="Okta switch to Classic UI setting" style="display: block; margin: auto; width:450px">
	</p>
</ol><ol start="2">
	<li>Select <strong>Web</strong> and <strong>SAML 2.0</strong>.</li>
	<img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt3063bf370598f1fd/601c016fdb520b688d826b29/saml-okta-create-new-app-blog.jpg" data-sys-asset-uid="blt3063bf370598f1fd" alt="Okta - choose Web and SAML 2.0" style="display: block; margin: auto; width:700px">
</ol><ol start="3">
	<li>Name your app whatever you’d like. Then you’ll be asked for some SAML settings:
	<ul>
		<li>Single sign-on URL: [ENTERPRISE SEARCH ENDPOINT]/users/saml_login</li>
		<li>Audience URI (SP Entity ID): [ENTERPRISE SEARCH ENDPOINT]/</li>
		<li>Everything else can be left as default</li>
	</ul>
	<img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt9a6a09564b974c4a/601c04464b8030688c37b5ea/saml-okta-select-settings-blog.png" data-sys-asset-uid="blt9a6a09564b974c4a" alt="Okta -- select settings" style="display: block; margin: auto; width:700px">
	</li>
</ol><ol start="4">
	<li>Click <strong>Next</strong> to finish setting up the application. If you haven’t already, don’t forget to assign some users to this new application.</li>
</ol><h2>Enterprise Search configuration</h2><p>We’ll need to add two pieces of information from Okta to your Elasticsearch.yml config. Your Elasticsearch.yml file can be found in the Elastic Cloud console. Select <strong>Edit</strong> under your deployment, then add the following to the <strong>User overrides settings</strong>:
</p><pre class="prettyprint">xpack.security.authc.realms.saml: 
         saml1: 
           order: 2 
           attributes.principal: "nameid" 
           attributes.groups: "groups" 
           idp.metadata.path: "[METADATA PATH]" 
           idp.entity_id: "[SAML ENTITY ID]" 
           sp.entity_id: "[ENTERPRISE SEARCH ENDPOINT]/" # Match these with your external_url. 
           sp.acs: "[ENTERPRISE SEARCH ENDPOINT]/users/saml_login" 
           sp.logout: "[ENTERPRISE SEARCH ENDPOINT]/logout"
</pre><h3>[METADATA PATH]</h3><p>In Okta, underneath the View Setup Instructions button is a link to Identity Provider metadata. Add that link, which will look something like&nbsp;<code>"https://[name].okta.com/app/[appid]/sso/saml/metadata"</code>.
</p><p><img class="shadow" src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/bltf1f96ee7e5dabb5b/601ac28d29a02c49ba1f48a0/saml-okta-identity-metadata-blog.jpg" data-sys-asset-uid="bltf1f96ee7e5dabb5b" alt="Okta identity provider metadata" style="display: block; margin: auto;">
</p><h3>[SAML ENTITY ID]</h3><p>In Okta, you can find this under the Sign On tab of your Applications: Click <strong>View Setup Instructions</strong>, and you’ll see Identity Provider Issuer.
</p><p><img class="shadow" src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/bltca1c68391cff2e70/601ac2f229a02c49ba1f48a8/saml-okta-entity-id-blog.png" data-sys-asset-uid="bltca1c68391cff2e70" alt="Okta get SAML entity ID" style="display: block; margin: auto;">
</p><p>We’ll also need to add the same <code>[ENTERPRISE SEARCH ENDPOINT]</code> from above with some URL path suffixes.
</p><p>You may also want to <a href="https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/master/saml-kibana.html">set up SAML for Kibana</a>. We won’t discuss that in detail here, but note that you will need separate SAML realms for Kibana and Enterprise Search, even if they share the same IdP (that is, there will be a separate entry in <code>xpack.security.authc.realms.saml</code> for Kibana).
</p><h2>Enable SAML on Enterprise Search</h2><p>And finally, scroll further down the Elastic Cloud deployment configuration page to the Enterprise Search <strong>User setting overrides</strong> section. We’ll add two things there:
</p><ul>
	<li>The <code>auth.source</code>, which must be <code>elasticsearch-saml</code> (or another auth type)</li>
	<li>The name of the SAML auth configuration namespace used in elasticsearch.yml. You can’t use 
	<code>cloud-saml*</code>, which is a reserved name on Elastic Cloud. We’ve used <code>saml1</code> in this example:</li>
</ul><pre class="prettyprint">ent_search.auth.saml1.source: elasticsearch-saml
ent_search.auth.saml1.order: 1 
ent_search.auth.saml1.description: "SAML login"
ent_search.auth.saml1.icon: "https://my-company.org/company-logo.png"
</pre><p>Scroll down, click <strong>Save</strong>, and wait for your cluster to restart. Now, when you select Launch next to Enterprise Search, you’ll have the option to log in with SAML SSO.
</p><p>And you’re off to the races!
</p><h2>Additional information</h2><p>Check out the <a href="https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/cloud/current/ec-securing-clusters-SAML.html">Secure your clusters with SAML</a> documentation for more info, including instructions for Enterprise Search versions 7.9.1 or earlier. If you’re not an existing Elastic Cloud customer and would like to try out the steps in this blog, you can sign up for a <a href="https://cloud.elastic.co/registration?elektra=blog-setting-up-saml-okta-edition">free 14-day trial</a>.
</p>

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Setting up SAML for Elastic Enterprise Search: Okta edition

Use the Elastic App Search APIs to build a search history-based feature for your users, such as a "These documents might also interest you" functionality.

<p>With <a href="https://www.elastic.co/app-search/">Elastic App Search</a>, you can add scalable, relevant search experiences to all your apps and websites. It offers a host of search result personalization options out of the box, such as <a href="https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/app-search/current/relevance-tuning-guide.html">weights and boosts</a> and <a href="https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/app-search/current/curations.html">curations</a>. You could also add a <em>these documents might interest you</em> feature, which would surface additional content for users, similar to documents they’ve previously searched for. This post walks you through the process of creating this capability using the robust App Search APIs.
</p> <strong><h2>Building the search client</h2></strong><p>The search client is built with the frontend application as usual, except for two additional requirements (apart from creating the actual suggestion views):
</p><ul>
	<li><a href="https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/app-search/current/tags.html">Tag each analytics event</a> with a user ID.</li>
	<ul>
		<li>For example, for each query and click, you’d send an additional analytics tags parameter:</li>

	<pre class="prettyprint">curl -X GET 'https://154d5f7d80774345fg92c8381891faf7.ent-search.us-east-1.aws.cloud.es.io/api/as/v1/engines/national-parks-demo/search' \ 
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \ 
-H 'Authorization: Bearer search-soaewu2ye6uc45dr8mcd54v8' \ 
-d '{ 
  "query": "everglade", 
  "analytics": { 
    "tags": ["UNIQUE_USER_ID"] 
  } 
}'
    </pre>
</ul>
	<li>When a list of the suggested results is needed (search request, page load, etc.), fire a request to the external controller.</li>
</ul><h2><strong>Building the external controller</strong></h2><p>The external controller is the backend service. You would have to build this to generate the query you can use to populate a list of documents based on that user’s past searches. On request, the external controller would need to do the following:
</p><ol>
	<li>Get the terms the user had searched for previously:</li>
	<ol>
		<li style="list-style-type:lower-alpha">Call the App Search analytics API for a <a href="https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/app-search/current/queries.html">list of the top <em>n</em> queries over <em>m</em> time range</a> filtered by that user ID as a tag. Here’s an example that returns the top 20 queries in the last two months of 2020 for the user tagged UNIQUE_USER_ID.</li>
	
	<pre class="prettyprint">curl -X GET 'https://154d5f7d80774345fg92c8381891faf7.ent-search.us-east-1.aws.cloud.es.io/api/as/v1/engines/national-parks-demo/analytics/queries' \ 
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \ 
-H 'Authorization: Bearer private-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx' \ 
-d '{ 
  "filters": {  
    "all": [ 
      { 
        "date": { 
          "from": "2020-10-31T12:00:00+00:00" 
          "to": "2020-12-31T00:00:00+00:00" 
        } 
      }, { 
        "tag": "UNIQUE_USER_ID" 
      } 
    ] 
  }, 
  "page": { 
    "size": 20 
  } 
}'
    </pre>
</ol>	
<li>(Optional) It’s possible to exclude documents that have been found through search results if, for example, you’d like to promote content or products that are more likely to be new to the user. Find the documents the user had clicked on and to exclude them:</li>
	<ol>
		<li style="list-style-type:lower-alpha">Call the App Search analytics API for a <a href="https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/app-search/current/clicks.html">list of the clicked documents filtered by user ID</a>.</li>
	</ol>
	<li>Generate suggested documents:</li>
	<ol>
		<li style="list-style-type:lower-alpha">Issue a <a href="https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/app-search/current/search.html#search-multi">multiple search query</a> to the App Search search API using the search terms generated from step 1.			
		</li>
		<pre class="prettyprint">curl -X POST 'https://154d5f7d80774345fg92c8381891faf7.ent-search.us-east-1.aws.cloud.es.io/api/as/v1/engines/national-parks-demo/multi_search' \ 
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \ 
-H 'Authorization: Bearer search-soaewu2ye6uc45dr8mcd54v8' \ 
-d '{ 
  "queries": [ 
    {"query": "california"}, 
    {"query": "florida"} 
  ] 
}'
        </pre>
		<li style="list-style-type:lower-alpha">(Optional) Add a <a href="https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/app-search/current/filters.html">filter to that query</a> to exclude the documents the user has already clicked on (generated from step 2).</li>
		<li style="list-style-type:lower-alpha">Return the results of that query to the client.</li>
	</ol>
</ol><h2><strong>FAQ and additional considerations</strong></h2><p>Here’s a list of questions and other things to consider as you build.
</p> <strong><h3>Can I use this for other segmentation beyond just individual users?</h3></strong><p>Yes! You can use this in whatever segmentation method you prefer. The tags are the key. Tags use strings that you define, so that could be by user, by geographic region, or any other cohort you can define based on what you know about the user.&nbsp;
</p><p>But remember, those tags need to be defined by search event and by click event. If you choose to change it up in the future and you’re not logging that data you’ll need to start over or infer cohorts otherwise.
</p> <strong><h3>What if I want to display search results based on some other arbitrary user data I own?</h3></strong><p>That’s great! As long as you can turn that data into query terms, you can modify the external controller to include those search results, too.
</p> <strong><h3>How can I tune this feature?</h3></strong><p>Outside of your existing relevance tuning settings, you can sharpen the results in a few ways:
</p><ul>
	<li>Limit the number of user queries returned more strictly</li>
	<li>Limit the time range of user queries returned more strictly</li>
	<li>Limit the total results returned from the multi-search query</li>
</ul> <strong><h3>Why can’t I do this on the front end?</h3></strong><p>You could if your client has a list of the user’s queries and optionally, documents on hand — for example with a cookie. Just don’t forget that private keys are required for analytics API access, which you would never want to expose.
</p><strong><h2>Next steps</h2></strong>If you’d like to experiment with building this search history-based feature, you can spin up a <a href="http://cloud.elastic.co/registration?elektra=blog-personalizing-app-search-based-on-search-history">free trial of App Search on Elastic Cloud</a> (or you can <a href="https://www.elastic.co/downloads/enterprise-search">download</a> and self-manage). If you have any questions or would like to let us know how your project is going, please drop us a line in our <a href="https://discuss.elastic.co/c/enterprise-search">discussion forums</a>.

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Personalizing Elastic App Search with results based on search history

Learn about all the advantages of migrating from Swiftype App Search to App Search on Elastic Cloud, such as reduced latency and increased scalability and flexibility.

<p>Whether you consume App Search from Elastic or from Swiftype, you’re getting a set of robust APIs and unprecedented relevance controls to deliver amazing search experiences. But what if you could have that same powerful set of search tools, only better, faster, more flexible, and still built on the powerful, scalable foundation of Elasticsearch? We’d like to invite you to migrate your Swiftype App Search deployment over to <a href="https://www.elastic.co/app-search">App Search on Elastic Cloud</a>. By doing so, you’ll get a host of benefits that will help future-proof your search experiences and let you enjoy all the new development taking place in Elastic Cloud.
</p><p>First, a little background. Swiftype joined forces with Elastic three years ago. We soon began the process of taking the standalone Swiftype App Search product and making it available on Elastic Cloud. Earlier in 2020, we announced the general availability App Search into Elastic Cloud in Elastic Cloud, making it available on all of our 40+ cloud regions across the globe, rather than just the single region of Swiftype App Search.
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt0dcc1204d3090052/5ed91a7d08d08473f007ab9a/app-search-analytics-dashboard-blog.jpg" data-sys-asset-uid="blt0dcc1204d3090052" alt="Elastic App Search Analytics dashboard" style="display: block; margin: auto;"><br>
</p> <strong><h2>Why make the move?</h2></strong><p>The end of life for Swiftype App Search is April 2023, but there are plenty of compelling reasons to migrate to <a href="https://www.elastic.co/cloud/">Elastic Cloud</a> sooner rather than later. To name just a few, you can count on improved speed and performance, all new feature development, and simpler pricing.
</p><p>Please note, though, that it’s business as usual for Swiftype Site Search. The end of life impacts Swiftype App Search only.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</p> <strong><h3>Faster performance, plus data locality</h3></strong><p>One of the big differences you’ll see is with performance. Elastic Cloud is available in <a href="https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/cloud/current/ec-regions-templates-instances.html">40+ regions</a> (and growing) on Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and AWS. So you’ll always enjoy the reduced latency and data sovereignty that accompanies keeping your data close by.
</p><p>HappyFresh, the premier grocery shopping and delivery platform in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand, had this to say:
</p><p><em>“App Search on Elastic Cloud allowed us to better serve our customers with faster response times, enhance overall performance, and ensure reliability of our services… and increased our flexibility and scalability, and enabled our search function to handle the drastic increase in site traffic.” </em>
</p><p><em>
– Fajar Budiprasetyo, CTO, HappyFresh
</em></p><p><a href="https://www.elastic.co/customers/happyfresh">See how App Search on Elastic Cloud helped HappyFresh thrive during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic</a>, when they experienced a 10x increase in web traffic and a 3x increase in search traffic, while at the same time boasting a 2x decrease in search latency.
</p> <strong><h3>Easier log and analytics management</h3></strong><p>App Search on Elastic Cloud inherits <a href="https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/enterprise-search/current/log-retention.html">index lifecycle management (ILM) </a>from the Elastic Stack to automatically manage logs and analytics retention. Logs and analytics are now cycled by default with ILM. Users can also change how long logs and analytics are retained with existing Elastic Stack tools, like the Kibana ILM policy management tool.&nbsp;
</p> <strong><h3>More flexibility and scalability&nbsp;</h3></strong><p>In traditional hosted search experiences where you have multiple users on the same server, customized deployments can lead to performance degradation for everyone else. Because of this "noisy neighbor" problem, heavy defaults with little configurability are typically put in place.<br>
</p><p>With App Search on Elastic Cloud, you can configure default limits — on analytics history, API logs, and number of fields and synonyms, to name a few — to meet your needs. And, more importantly, your performance isn’t impacted by other users.
</p> <strong><h3>Future features</h3></strong><p>The pace of innovation at Elastic is rapid. With numerous new releases each year, the Elastic Cloud feature set is always growing and ever improving. A tighter connection to the fast-growing Elastic Stack unlocks a lot of potential improvements in App Search’s future: We have a lot of new developments and performance improvements planned for App Search on Elastic Cloud. (These new features will of course come to the self-managed version of App Search as well.) So by migrating, you’ll ensure that your search experiences will always include all the latest updates.&nbsp;
</p> <strong><h3>Simple, transparent pricing for easy scaling&nbsp;&nbsp;</h3></strong><p>A hallmark of Elastic Cloud is our <a href="https://www.elastic.co/pricing/philosophy">transparent, resource-based pricing</a> across all of our solutions. We don’t employ limiting pricing based on per-query, per-user, per-index combinations. Instead, you can flexibly scale up (or down) whenever the need arises. You’ll also know that you’ll be paying only for the resources (RAM, disk space) you use, without feeling boxed in by restrictive pricing models you’ll see elsewhere.
</p> <strong><h3>New horizons, with full access to the entire Elastic Stack</h3></strong><p>Migrating to Elastic Cloud opens a lot of new doors. All of the <a href="https://www.elastic.co/">Elastic solutions</a> — Enterprise Search (which is made up of our App Search and Workplace Search products), Observability, and Security — are all built on the same stack. So if you want to explore other use cases, such as logging, metrics, or security, they’re all accessible to you in Elastic Cloud.
</p> <strong><h2>More information and next steps</h2></strong><p>To help you learn more, we’ve also put together a <a href="https://www.elastic.co/webinars/migrating-from-swiftype-app-search-to-elastic-cloud?token=6eto8dybr">webinar that highlights all the benefits of migrating to App Search on Elastic Cloud</a>, including a walkthrough of the process.
</p><p>You can also reference our documentation for <a href="https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/enterprise-search/current/migrating-from-app-search-on-swiftype-com.html">step-by-step migration instructions</a>, or start up a conversation in our <a href="https://discuss.elastic.co/c/enterprise-search/app-search/72">App Search forum</a>.
</p><p>If you’d like to try out App Search on Elastic Cloud, you can always start up a <a href="http://cloud.elastic.co/registration">free trial</a>.&nbsp;
</p><p>To recap, here are the future plans for Swiftype App Search (note that Swiftype Site Search will continue unaffected):
</p><ul>
	<li>Signups on swiftype.com will be shut off soon</li>
	<li>Planned end-of-life scheduled for early 2023</li>
</ul>

Migrating from Swiftype App Search to Elastic Cloud

Elastic Enterprise Search now includes App Search on Elastic Cloud, scalability with meta engines, and SAML/SSO support for Workplace Search.

<p>We’re excited to announce the latest updates to the Elastic Enterprise Search solution: today marks the release of Elastic App Search 7.6 and Elastic Workplace Search 7.6. In this update we'll share some highlights of these releases, as well as details about our big recent launch of App Search on Elastic Cloud.
</p><h2>But first, a new name</h2><p>You may have noticed we’ve up-leveled <a href="https://www.elastic.co/enterprise-search">Elastic Enterprise Search</a> as the new “umbrella” solution name that encompasses our suite of search products: Elastic App Search, Elastic Site Search, and Elastic Workplace Search (the product formerly known as Enterprise Search — more on that later).
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt583719d86319a2d6/5e3c6e3d8a407162a896a2c8/enterprise-search-7-6-products-blog.jpg" data-sys-asset-uid="blt583719d86319a2d6" alt="Enterprise Search product overview" style="display: block; margin: auto;">
</p><p>The new name reflects our belief that to bring modern search experiences to market quickly they must be enterprise-ready to scale on day one. They also need to support all different types of users — web visitors, customers, employees, partners, app users — with the scale, speed, and relevance you’ve come to expect from all Elastic products.
</p><p>Many of you may have even known — and used — these products under the Swiftype brand.
</p><p>Now all Elastic Enterprise Search products are in sync with new Elastic Stack releases. So going forward you can expect unified Enterprise Search release feature announcements like the one you’re reading now.
</p><h2>Off to the (Elastic) clouds we go with App Search on Elastic Cloud</h2><p>Elastic App Search is already a go-to for its ease of adding dynamic, powerful search experiences to your corporate website, customer support portal, internal help desk, SaaS application, or mobile app. With App Search 7.6, we’ve now extended those full App Search capabilities to the Elastic Cloud with <a href="https://elastic.co/blog/elastic-app-search-now-available-on-elasticsearch-service">App Search on Elastic Cloud</a>. So deploy App Search anywhere Elastic Cloud runs (24 regions, and counting) with global cloud partners GCP, AWS, and Azure.
</p><div class="embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9 shadow m-t-40 m-b-40">
	<div class="vsc-controller" data-vscid="9zhmcsih5">
	</div><video autoplay="autoplay" playsinline="playsinline" muted="muted" loop="loop" data-vscid="9zhmcsih5"><source src="https://assets.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt9f7ae96efc52ea08/5e3c82b3c77dbe6512a25786/app-search-on-elastic-cloud.mp4" type="video/mp4"></video>
</div><p>It’s really as simple as point and click to get up and running with an App Search deployment inside the Elastic Cloud console.
</p><p>If you’d like to dive in deeper, we’ve created some handy <a href="https://www.elastic.co/blog/getting-started-with-elastic-app-search-on-elasticsearch-service">step-by-step content</a> to walk you through setting up your first App Search on Elastic Cloud deployment. Or <a href="https://www.elastic.co/webinars/getting-started-with-elastic-app-search">check out our live Getting Started with Elastic App Search webinar</a>, which will cover the ins and outs of setup, fine-tuning your search experience, and scaling it out as you grow.
</p><p>Already using App Search? Learn how to upgrade to 7.6 in this helpful <a href="/blog/how-to-upgrade-elastic-app-search">step-by-step blog</a>.
</p><h2>More autonomy and scalability options with meta engines
</h2><p>As your business needs become more complex and you deploy more and more search engines across your web properties, managing all of the engines spread across business units and use cases can be difficult. To alleviate these challenges, App Search 7.6 introduces meta engines for both App Search on Elastic Cloud and self-managed versions. This feature is available for Platinum and Enterprise subscription levels.
</p><p>Meta engines provide the ability to search across multiple engines by selecting which existing sub-engines to include in the new meta engine. This allows large companies to unify and scale their search while still allowing admins complete control over the behavior of each individual sub-engine.
</p><p>For example, if your company has a separate engine for Division A, another one for Division B, and a third engine for Division C, users can now create a top-level meta engine — with its own independent tuning, relevance rules, boosting, and curations — that searches over the content indexed within the three underlying engines. Meta engines are “document-less” engines that query the indexes in existing sub-engines, alleviating the need to index content multiple times even when use cases vary.
</p><p>Beyond improved scalability, meta engines also give individual managers of these sub-engines more autonomy to create their own tuning setting, relevance controls, and curations.
</p><div class="embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9 shadow m-t-40 m-b-40">
	<div class="vsc-controller" data-vscid="stt5jzb5z">
	</div><video autoplay="autoplay" playsinline="playsinline" muted="muted" loop="loop" data-vscid="stt5jzb5z"><source src="https://assets.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/bltb8a999ffeeb59713/5e3d79220ee5056ab4d87540/app-search-meta-engines-7-6.mp4" type="video/mp4"></video>
</div><h2>That’s not all</h2><p>Elastic Workplace Search — the product formerly known as Enterprise Search — remains beta software. Head to the <a href="https://www.elastic.co/downloads/enterprise-search">Elastic Workplace Search download page</a> to grab the latest binary and follow the installation instructions to start connecting content sources.
</p><p>In the 7.6 release, we’re making your IT Ops team very happy with the support of security assertion markup language (SAML) protocol. So if your organization leverages single sign-on (SSO), you can now manage and provide access to Elastic Workplace Search using SAML.
</p><h2>Try it out!</h2><p>Existing Elastic Cloud customers can access App Search directly from the <a href="https://cloud.elastic.co/">Elastic Cloud console</a> today. New to the Elastic Cloud? Start a <a href="https://www.elastic.co/app-search">free 14-day trial of App Search on Elastic Cloud</a>. Or <a href="https://www.elastic.co/downloads/app-search">download</a> the self-managed version of App Search.
</p><p>Links:
</p><p><a href="https://www.elastic.co/downloads/enterprise-search">Workplace Search (beta) download page</a>
</p><p><a href="https://www.elastic.co/app-search">App Search on Elastic Cloud - 14-day free trial</a>
</p><p><a href="https://www.elastic.co/downloads/app-search">App Search self-managed version</a>
</p>

blog-banner-release-enterprise-search.png

blog-thumb-release-enterprise-search.png

Elastic Enterprise Search updates for 7.6.0

Learn about new Result Settings, performance improvements, Metricbeat monitoring, and more.

<p>We’re pleased to announce the release of Elastic App Search 7.5.0 — available as a <a href="/app-search/service?baymax=elastic-web&elektra=blog&rogue=750-release">managed service</a> or as a <a href="/downloads/app-search?baymax=elastic-web&elektra=blog&rogue=750-release">download</a>. This release features new Result Settings, performance improvements, a Metricbeat monitoring module for App Search, and API logs and analytics available in Elastic Common Schema.
</p> <strong><h2>Optimized response times and improved search experiences with Result Settings</h2></strong><p>The default fields returned and highlighted with a query response can now be controlled in the App Search dashboard, so you can optimize query performance and improve search experiences. See the <a href="/blog/elastic-app-search-performant-rich-search-results-with-result-settings?baymax=elastic-web&elektra=blog&rogue=750-release">Result Settings release post</a> for more details.
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/bltcfc4104332a3f8e4/5dcd68d8d5a8797b8fa119fc/app-search-7-5-result-settings-blog.jpg" data-sys-asset-uid="bltcfc4104332a3f8e4" alt="Result Settings UI" style="display: block; margin: auto;">
</p><strong><h2>Performance improvements via merged processes, queue management and logging reduction</h2></strong><p>We've merged all App Search processes into one, which means better resource utilization and performance. (Previously, there were three processes: the core server, a worker process, and a Filebeat instance for analytics and event logging.)
</p><p>Additionally, we’ve made significant improvements in requests queue management that allow App Search to handle higher request loads and fail gracefully if load limits are reached.
</p><p>But that’s not all. We've also removed the health check from App Search logs and added an option to slim down health checks, so users can exclude queue state information from the results. This improves performance by reducing the load on the underlying Elasticsearch clusters. To access this lightweight version of the health check, pass a <code>?verbose=false</code> flag to the health API endpoint.
</p> <strong><h2><strong>Monitoring capabilities with the Metricbeat App Search module</strong></h2><p>We’ve added an App Search module for Metricbeat, so monitoring can be done within the Elastic Stack. The module calls App Search’s health API endpoint and provides various stats, including:
</p><ul>
	<li>JVM memory usage</li>
	<li>Queue counts</li>
	<li>API and dashboard response times</li>
	<li>Request rate</li>
</ul><p>Check out the <a href="/guide/en/beats/metricbeat/7.5/metricbeat-module-appsearch.html?baymax=elastic-web&elektra=blog&rogue=750-release">Metricbeat docs</a> for details on how to add the App Search module.
</p> <strong><h2>API logs and analytics available in Elastic Common Schema</h2></strong><p>App Search API logs and analytics are now available in <a href="/blog/introducing-the-elastic-common-schema?baymax=elastic-web&elektra=blog&rogue=750-release">Elastic Common Schema</a> (ECS), so you can analyze your App Search logs alongside any other data in applications like Elastic SIEM.
</p><p>To toggle logs and analytics in ECS, simply update <code>app-search.yml</code> to include the following:
</p><pre class="prettyprint">enable_ecs_logs: true
</pre> <strong><h2>See it in action</h2></strong><p>App Search 7.5 provides the search and tooling for a great search experience that’s now even more performant and measurable. <a href="/downloads/app-search?baymax=elastic-web&elektra=blog&rogue=750-release">Download it today</a> to give it a try!
</p></strong>

AUTHOR

Articles by Nick Chow

Accelerate search experiences with Elastic App Search and Google Cloud Firestore

Setting up SAML for Elastic Enterprise Search: Okta edition

Personalizing Elastic App Search with results based on search history

Migrating from Swiftype App Search to Elastic Cloud

Elastic Enterprise Search updates for 7.6.0

Elastic App Search 7.5.0 released

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AUTHOR

Articles by Nick Chow

Accelerate search experiences with Elastic App Search and Google Cloud Firestore

Setting up SAML for Elastic Enterprise Search: Okta edition

Personalizing Elastic App Search with results based on search history

Migrating from Swiftype App Search to Elastic Cloud

Elastic Enterprise Search updates for 7.6.0

Elastic App Search 7.5.0 released