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Risky Operations in Elasticsearch and OpenSearch.
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Blog Post: Risky Operations in Elasticsearch and OpenSearch.

When operating large search clusters with heavy traffic, there are certain risky operations you should avoid. In this post, we present a comprehensive list of these operations to raise awarness and help you avoid footguns.

Oct 1, 2025

What AI Engineers Should Know About Search

What AI Engineers Should Know About Search

Things AI should know about search. At least 50 of them. By Doug Turnbull.

Jun 25, 2024

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

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.

May 11, 2023

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Small Dataset, Big Results: Upgrading Search with Limited Content

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 puzz…

Apr 12, 2023

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What is OpenSearch? And why you should use it

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

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

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 cas…

Mar 20, 2023

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What is Elasticsearch? And why you should use it

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 ma…

Mar 19, 2023

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

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 …

Mar 16, 2023

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4 Ways to Reduce Costs and Improve Performance with Elasticsearch

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

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Log4J Debrief: How Bonsai Handled the Zero-Day Vulnerability

Log4J Debrief: How Bonsai Handled the Zero-Day Vulnerability

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

Dec 17, 2021

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

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

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5 Principles of Search

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 6, 2021

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

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

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