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Discover Lucene.

Comparing Lucene to Elasticsearch is very apples to oranges, in my opinion. It's like if MySQL did something people didn't like and the answer was "Discover InnoDB".

Sure, Lucene might be all you need, if all you need is some basic freetext search on a small set of data that fits on a single machine.

Though maybe you misspoke and meant to say "Discover Solr"...

Hm... Nope, ElasticSearch is a good entry point into Lucene. As your software needs grow, you may discover the benefits of going a level below. Start with ELK, then discover ElasticSearch, then use Lucene with your own way of distributing data over multiple machines if needed.

Personally, I never had to use more than 1 machine even for huge data sets (JFYI, Orbis and Wikipedia fit onto one bare metal server).

Lucene's pretty great. The segments file model even works pretty well with S3.

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