Bonsai Blog

Why improving search feels impossible and how a new architecture can get you unstuck

Search is a perpetually frustrating feature. Even the standard search experience remains hard to build, hard to maintain, and hard to improve. The real frustration, however, comes from the fact that there is a consensus belief, from developers to CTOs, that search is important. But despite that, most search experiences remain mediocre and improving those search experiences appears impossible.

May 11, 2023

Small Dataset, Big Results: Upgrading Search with Limited Content

Even if you have a small dataset to search, there’s always more to do than return an alphabetically sorted list. Search is a user experience puzzle. Even with a small dataset, there are several creative ways to upgrade search relevance.

Apr 12, 2023

What is OpenSearch? And why you should use it

OpenSearch is a community-driven, open-source search and analytics suite derived from Apache 2.0 licensed Elasticsearch 7.10.2 & Kibana 7.10.2.

Apr 11, 2023

What is Elasticsearch? And why you should use it

Elasticsearch is a distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine that is used to query, index, and store JSON data. While Elasticsearch has many use cases, it's most often used as an enterprise-level search tool that enables users to find information quickly in large quantities of structured data to get relevant results and powerful analytics.

Mar 20, 2023

How to Reduce the Number of Shards in Elasticsearch: A Shard Shrinking Guide

It’s a very common intuition that more scale must mean more shards. And the ease of creating more indices and more shards means that many use cases… do just that. But there comes a point where there are too many shards and they must be reduced. Here, we explore three approaches.

Mar 20, 2023

The search renaissance is here (but the present is still medieval)

Search has become a hot topic. ML-powered search is pointing the way toward significantly more powerful search engines. Meanwhile, AI-based chat tools like ChatGPT (and even with recent hamstringing, Bing) present an orthogonal challenge, a search experience that resembles question and answer.

Mar 16, 2023

4 Ways to Reduce Costs and Improve Performance with Elasticsearch

What can your team do to get better performance out of Elasticsearch, while at the same time reducing costs?

Dec 29, 2021

Log4J Debrief: How Bonsai Handled the Zero-Day Vulnerability

Developers worldwide worked through the weekend to defend against the Log4J vulnerability.

Dec 17, 2021

5 Principles of Search

Want to find a needle in a haystack? Just drop the haystack into a search engine, type “needle” into the query box, and click Search.

Dec 7, 2021

One Word to Help You Build a More Scalable Search Engine: Precomputation

The most efficient way to create anything complex is to begin with the first principles.

Dec 7, 2021

Want to build a powerful search engine? Start with the user experience

Just a few years ago, user experience in design was seen as an afterthought.

Nov 23, 2021

Slow search engine? CPU is probably your biggest bottleneck

Your website visitors don’t have much patience for slow load speeds. Most users will leave if they type something into your search engine and have to wait too long for results.

Nov 19, 2021

Comparison of Elasticsearch Ruby Gems

If you’ve ever wanted to supercharge your app’s search capabilities, there’s no better tool to use than Elasticsearch. Integrating Elasticsearch into a Ruby on Rails app is a fairly straightforward process once you’ve selected a framework.

Aug 18, 2021