The Evolution of (Elastic)Search at Yelp

Joseph Lynch

Christopher Tidder

There was a time when Yelp was a local search company with one search engine and a single 'search' team. Now, Yelp has hundreds of search applications that rely on tens of search clusters run by tens of teams. Whether we use it for real time full text searches, or offline batch analysis jobs, Elasticsearch remains fundamental to the way Yelp scales search. In this talk, we will tell you the story of this transformation, highlighting the reason we chose Elasticsearch, the infrastructure we have built around Elasticsearch, and some of the applications that our engineers are using our search platform to achieve.