A Fun Japanese Elasticsearch Promotion Video
September 10, 2015
Elasticsearch is one of the top open source search engines and is employed by many companies including Netflix, Wikipedia, GitHub, and Facebook. Elasticsearch wants to get a foothold into the Japanese technology market. We can assume, because Japan is one of the world’s top producers of advanced technology and has a huge consumer base. Once a technology is adopted in Japan, you can bet that it will have an even bigger adoption rate.
The company has launched a Japanese promotional campaign and a uploaded video entitled “Elasticsearch Product Video” to its YouTube channel. The video comes with Japanese subtitles with appearances by CEO Steven Schuurman, VP of Engineering Kevin Kluge, Elasticsearch creator Shay Bannon, and VP of Sales Justin Hoffman. The video showcases how Elasticsearch is open source software, how it has been integrated into many companies’ frameworks, its worldwide reach, product improvement, as well as the good it can do.
Justin Hoffman said that, “I think the concept of an open source company bringing a commercial product to market is very important to our company. Because the customers want to know on one hand that you have the open source community and its evolution and development at the top of your priority list. On the other hand, they appreciate that you’re innovating and bringing products to market that solve real problems.”
It is a neat video that runs down what Elasticsearch is capable of, the only complaint is that bland music in the background. They could benefit from licensing the Jive Aces “Bring Me Sunshine” it relates the proper mood.
Whitney Grace, September 10, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Elasticsearch is the Jack of All Trades at Goldman Sachs
August 25, 2015
The article titled Goldman Sachs Puts Elasticsearch to Work on Information Week discusses how programmers at Goldman Sachs are using Elasticsearch. Programmers there are working on applications to exploit both the data retrieval capabilities as well as the faculty it has for unstructured data. The article explains,
“Elasticsearch and its co-products — Logstash, Elastic’s server log data retrieval system, and Kibana, a dashboard reporting system — are written in Java and behave as core Java systems. This gives them an edge with enterprise developers who quickly recognize how to integrate them into applications. Logstash has plug-ins that draw data from the log files of 165 different information systems. It works natively with Elasticsearch and Kibana to feed them data for downstream analytics, said Elastic’s Jeff Yoshimura, global marketing leader.”
The article provides detailed examples of how Elastic is being used in legal, finance, and engineering departments within Goldman Sachs. For example, rather than hiring a “platoon of lawyers” to comb through Goldman’s legal contracts, a single software engineer was able to build a system that digitized everything and flagged contract documents that needed revision. With over 9,000 employees, Goldman currently has several thousand using Elasticsearch. The role of search has expanded, and it is important that companies recognize the many functions it can provide.
Chelsea Kerwin, August 25, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
The Integration of Elasticsearch and Sharepoint Adds Capabilities
August 24, 2015
The article on the IDM Blog titled BA Insight Brings Together Elasticsearch and Sharepoint describes yet another vendor embracing Elasticsearch and falling in love again with Sharepoint. The integration of Elasticsearch and Sharepoint enables customers to use Elasticsearch through Sharepoint portals. The integration also made BA Insight’s portfolio accessible through open source Elasticsearch as well as Logstash and Kibana, Elastic’s data retrieval and reporting systems, respectively. The article quotes the Director of Product Management at Elastic,
“BA Insight makes it possible for Elasticsearch and SharePoint to work seamlessly together…By enabling Elastic’s powerful real-time search and analytics capabilities in SharePoint, enterprises will be able to optimize how they use data within their applications and portals.” “Combining Elasticsearch and SharePoint opens up a world of exciting applications for our customers, ranging from geosearch and pattern search through search on machine data, data visualization, and low-latency search,” said Jeff Fried, CTO of BA Insight.”
Specific capabilities that the integration will enable include connectors to over fifty system, auto-classification, federation to improve the presentation of results within the Sharepoint framework, applications like Smart Previews and Matter Comparison. Users also have the ability to decide for themselves whether they want to use the Sharepoint search engine or Elastic’s, or combine them and put the results together into a set. Empowering users to make the best choice for their data is at the heart of the integration.
Chelsea Kerwin, August 24, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Developing an NLP Semantic Search
May 15, 2015
Can you imagine a natural language processing semantic search engine? It would be a lovely tool to use in your daily routines and make research a bit easier. If you are working on such a project and are making a progress, keep at that startup because this is lucrative field at the moment. Over at Stack Overflow, an entrepreneuring spirit is trying to develop a “Semantic Search With NLP And Elasticsearch”:
“I am experimenting with Elasticsearch as a search server and my task is to build a “semantic” search functionality. From a short text phrase like “I have a burst pipe” the system should infer that the user is searching for a plumber and return all plumbers indexed in Elasticsearch.
Can that be done directly in a search server like Elasticsearch or do I have to use a natural language processing (NLP) tool like e.g. Maui Indexer. What is the exact terminology for my task at hand, text classification? Though the given text is very short as it is a search phrase.”
Given that this question was asked about three years ago, a lot has been done not only with Elasticsearch, but also NLP. Search is moving towards a more organic experience, but accuracy is often muddled by different factors. These include the quality of the technology, classification, taxonomies, ads in results, and even keywords (still!).
NLP semantic search is closer now than it was three years ago, but technology companies would invest a lot of money in a startup that can bridge the gap between natural language and machine learning.
Whitney Grace, May 15, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Elasticsearch Transparent about Failed Jepsen Tests
May 11, 2015
The article on Aphyr titled Call Me Maybe: Elasticsearch 1.5.0 demonstrates the ongoing tendency for Elasticsearch to lose data during network partitions. The author goes through several scenarios and found that users can lose documents if nodes crash, a primary pauses, a network partitions into two intersecting components or into two discrete components. The article explains,
“My recommendations for Elasticsearch users are unchanged: store your data in a database with better safety guarantees, and continuously upsert every document from that database into Elasticsearch. If your search engine is missing a few documents for a day, it’s not a big deal; they’ll be reinserted on the next run and appear in subsequent searches. Not using Elasticsearch as a system of record also insulates you from having to worry about ES downtime during elections.”
The article praises Elasticsearch for their internal approach to documenting the problems, and especially the page they opened in September going into detail on resiliency. The page clarifies the question among users as to what it meant that the ticket closed. The page states pretty clearly that ES failed their Jepsen tests. The article exhorts other vendors to follow a similar regimen of supplying such information to users.
Chelsea Kerwin, May 11, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Elasticsearch Becomes Elastic, Acquires Found
March 25, 2015
The article on Forbes.com titled Elasticsearch Changes Its Name, Enjoys An Amazing Open Source Ride and Hopes to Avoid Mistakes explains the latest acquisition and the reasons behind the name change to simply Elastic. That choice is surmised to be due to Elastic’s wish to avoid confusion over the open source product Elasticsearch and the company itself. It also signals the company’s movement beyond solely providing search technology. The article also discusses the acquisition of Found, a Norwegian company,
“Found provides hosted and fully managed Elasticsearch clusters with technology that automates processes such as installation, configuration, maintenance, backup, and highavailability. Doing all of this heavy-lifting enables developers to integrate a search engine into their database, website or app quickly In addition, Found has created a turnkey process to scale Elasticsearch clusters up or down at any time and without any downtime. Found’s Elasticsearch as a Service offering is being used by companies like Docker, Gild… and the New York Public Library.”
Elasticsearch has raised almost $105 million since its start after being created by Shay Banon in 2010. The article posits that they have been doing the right things so far, such as the acquisition of Kibana, the visualization vendor. Although some startups relying on Elasticsearch may throw shade at the Found acquisition, there are no foreseeable threats to Elastic’s future.
Chelsea Kerwin, March 25, 2015
Stephen E Arnold, Publisher of CyberOSINT at www.xenky.com
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