How one partnership powers search for over 2 million WP Engine users

Software vendors and technology companies face a massive hurdle today. They need to provide high-precision search across huge volumes of proprietary data while ensuring peak performance and uptime for their customers. WP Engine is an in-demand platform that hosts millions of websites worldwide. For their team, search is not just a basic utility.

“We’ve evolved from being a speed, security, and hosting company into a company that provides tools to help your website succeed online. And search is one of those tools,” says Patterson.

Traditional search architectures couldn’t provide the robust, external site search solution WP Engine customers demanded. As the WP Engine team began investigating, they discovered that ineffective search was at the heart of their problems.

Patterson says, “We wanted to solve it for people using WordPress, or at least that’s how our solution started. So, the question became: how do we do this in a way that is super speedy, lightweight, and cost-efficient for our business while ensuring customers aren’t breaking the bank?”

WP Engine needed a flexible search solution that could handle the variety of data structures and websites they provide. Their goal was to find a tool that could map and index diverse data from any website for any owner and for any visitor — all outside of WordPress.

This is a common problem for project managers. It’s like a pendulum with ease of use on one side and the most relevant search experience on the other. As a product manager, you want ease of use, but you’re not willing to forfeit relevancy. That’s nonnegotiable.

Why choose between fast search and cost-efficient storage when you can get both? Elastic removes that exact complexity. With Google Cloud as the foundation, the platform can support a multitenant architecture while eliminating the need to cobble together different tools for search and scale.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) provides the perfect foundation for this architecture. “Elastic is using one of the best and the greatest of Google Cloud,” says Barankanira. “The fact that it is natively built on top of GCP has provided Elastic with so much flexibility and performance. Elastic is not just another piece within a GCP environment — it is deeply integrated within the Google Cloud platform."

As AI becomes the next frontier, Elastic and GCP are pioneering advancements in large language models (LLMs) to bring AI innovation to customers.

LLMs can reason, analyze context, utilize tools, call APIs, and even take action autonomously. However, their true potential is unlocked when they are anchored in customer context, ensuring their output is both relevant and actionable.

“This is where Elastic and Google Cloud really win together,” says Barankanira. “Elastic is the only partner we have right now with native grounding within Vertex AI. Because of that, it becomes effortless for customers using both Google Cloud and Elastic to develop any kind of generative AI application.”

Elastic bridges the gap between the LLM, trained on general knowledge, and your proprietary data. “AI has come and changed the world. But when I talk to customers every day who are building websites, their problems are still the same: I need people to come to my website, and once they’re at my website, I need them to convert in some way,” Patterson adds.

How do you turn website visitors into customers? With more AI agents and fewer humans browsing sites, every interaction counts. AI-powered conversational interfaces are powerful new tools for boosting conversion rates. But these tools are only as good as the context they’re given. 

Giving conversational tools, chatbots, and agents the right context is a search problem. By connecting a real-time, managed vector database of your content directly to a conversational interface, you can give the LLM the context it needs to create a conversion machine.

Our conversation with WP Engine and Google Cloud highlighted how the right foundation is essential for innovation. “Customers don’t want to manage search, and they don’t want to manage infrastructure,” says Barankanira. “They do want access to the latest innovations. Elastic and Google are two of the most innovative companies that exist on this planet.”

Explore how Elastic and Google Cloud can actively support your strategic business goals. We are here to help you build smarter, optimize costs, and scale faster than ever before. To learn more about how Elastic’s partnership with GCP transformed search for WP Engine, check out the full webinar.