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New in elasticsearch: Percolator - finds saved searches that match a document (elasticsearch.org)
30 points by simonw on Feb 9, 2011 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments



I've been following elasticsearch for a while now - it's a fascinating project. It's similar to Solr, but it's designed from the ground up for seamless sharded horizontal scaling (Solr is mainly designed for master/slave replication), speakers JSON/REST by default and keeps on getting more and more interesting features - geospatial support is baked in for example.

Percolator has really captured my imagination. Instead of storing documents and running searches against them, you can store searches and feed in a document and ask "which search queries would this match". It turns search upside down. I'm not a hundred percent sure what this is useful for (two examples would be a saved-search alert feature of some sort or something for firing off events based on an incoming stream of data, such as the Twitter firehose) but it's a fascinating ability.


Another use case would be to setup business rules or even get a workflow going. If i add this document it matches the queries a,b,c so i can do steps x,y and/or z afterwards.

Percolators is a truely perculiar feauture indeed :)


The "reverse search" use case is basically a categorical analyzer similar to how some fraud-detection mechanisms work at credit agencies.

There's probably a killer app somewhere that could use this feature.




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