Goodbye SOLR, Hello ElasticSearch!

What do Instacart, Wikipedia, Slack, and Yelp have in common these days?  They are all using ElasticSearch to power their experiences.  At the heart of all of these popular products and thousands more, is a screaming-fast, scalable, open-source search technology that grew more out of big data and analytics than more traditional document retrieval systems.  ElasticSearch has absolutely dominated the search scene with its strengths in handling massive data sets, working across a wide variety of use cases and its unparalleled community support.  Oh, and did we mention that it has out-of-the-box machine learning?

So, when the HCL Commerce team decided that our older SOLR-based search technology just wasn’t meeting our customers’ needs anymore, we unanimously voted to move forward with ElasticSearch.  We believe that making a strategic investment in this technology will not only dramatically improve our customers’ on-site search experiences, but it will also become a powerful core data platform that all of our solutions can leverage.  We could use it to find anomalies in user behavior, such as a sudden reduction in authenticated sessions, or promo codes usage spikes.  We can use it to share insights with precision marketing platforms such as HCL Unica or to help personalize content recommended to users on your company blog.  The possibilities are truly only limited by our collective imaginations.

Why stop there though?!  Once we agreed to move forward with ElasticSearch, our team really energized around the project and we found even more ways to compliment the core search offering with our own customizations, open source code, and even help from Stanford University.  We arrived at a search stack that leveraged Elastic, Apache NiFi, and Stanford CoreNLP (Natural Language Processing).  These additional tools, plus plenty of our own customizations have breathed new life to the Commerce Search experience and positioned this capability to be extremely competitive with licensed search technology.  Customers will no longer be forced to integrate with 3^rd party search tools in order to take advantage of all of the key value props they have come to expect with modern search.

Our newly announced Google partnership brings a lot of additional energy to the future of Commerce search.  So now, in addition to everything mentioned above, we will super-charge the search capabilities with enhancements such as voice, image and barcode search.  We also plan on leveraging Google’s big guns to add additional domain-specific data sets, BigQuery and AutoML to even further personalize search across industries and user personas. 

To learn more, please download our latest whitepaper that goes into much more depth on the newest HCL Search capabilities!