Product release

Search UI Version 1.0.0 Released

We’ve learned that building rich, engaging search experiences can be challenging — more challenging than most expect. Not only must you create logic for data ingestion, search, and search relevance, but you also have to think about the human interaction. There are many often-overlooked details in creating search experiences: how a user will input their queries — including their inevitable typos and mistakes —  and how to display search results with options for refinement are such two examples. But what makes good search great is delivering on those small yet critical details of the search user interface.

When we launched Elastic App Search, we made fast, scaleable, and relevant application search easier to deliver. App Search provides the rich, refined APIs for building powerful search without starting from scratch. And it also provides intuitive dashboard UIs for robust relevance tuning and search analytics. But we wanted to take it one step further and empower our community with the tools to also create rich search user interfaces with ease.

With that in mind, we’re very pleased to announce that Search UI is version 1.0.0 and production ready.

Introducing Search UI

Search UI is an open-source JavaScript library that allows you to add search to a website or web app with just a few lines of code, while remaining easily customizable. It includes all of the components needed for a complete search experience, including search bar, search suggestions and autocomplete, and results pages with dynamic filters. 

search-ui-demo-screenshot.jpg

A Whole Host of Features, Ready to Be Deployed

Using Search UI, you can easily deliver on some of those extras that take your search page beyond a simple list of results and transform it into a truly great user experience. For example:

  • Results highlighting, to help your users see their results more clearly.
  • Search as you type, with a balanced approach between reactivity and calling the server too often.
  • Autocomplete and query suggestions, again with all the work already done to make this as efficient as possible.
  • Paging and sorting, without you having to worry about all the possible repercussions when terms or filters change.
  • Facets and filtering, and prebuilt solutions for all of the complexities that those entail, such as support for disjunctive or conjunctive facets, filtering, ranges and sliders, and more.
  • URL preservation, so that your users can easily share search results or reload pages without losing their results.

Flexible and Extensible

Search UI is designed to work with any JavaScript framework, and has prebuilt React components. It works out of the box with Elastic App Search: ingest your data, download and import the Search UI library into your code, then configure the App Search connector — that's it! You're ready to build elegant search and use the refined App Search features and analytical insights to perfect your search relevance.

Plus, we’ll continue to evolve and enhance Search UI, so you’ll always have a place to turn to solve your UI challenges. We also welcome contributions from the open source community, and our developers are available to chat within Gitter.

Get Started Today 

When you use the new Search UI with Elastic App Search, you’ll find a world of possibilities to easily build some amazing search applications and experiences is now at your fingertips.

Head over to Search UI on GitHub to checkout the library.

Looking for an in-depth tutorial for building search experiences with Search UI and App Search? Read our blog about building a great search experience with Search UI and React!