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elastic
elasticsearch
Java2010–2024
elastic / elasticsearch

elasticsearch

Free and Open Source, Distributed, RESTful Search Engine

Systems & InfrastructureSearch & Information Retrieval
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
74Distinct people
88Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
78.7KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Free and Open Source, Distributed, RESTful Search Engine

GitHub

Where it is used

  • GitHub — GitHub uses Elasticsearch to power its search services as the core search engine. Source
  • anyone — “Anyone.com, a global AI-powered real estate platform, replaced a Postgres search back end it had outgrown with Elasticsearch, moving 210 million production records onto a single index in about a week and a half and consolidating its entire search infrastructure into three lines of Terraform.” Source
  • 1 more documented example

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 12:45:45 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year88 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2010-07-20 20:38:02 UTC to 2024-10-29 14:01:46 UTC.

0510152010-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20102011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 1 submissions, 7 comments2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 0 submissions, 8 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 2 submissions, 6 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 1 submissions, 3 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20172018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 15 mentions; 1 submissions, 14 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 10 mentions; 0 submissions, 10 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 14 mentions; 0 submissions, 14 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 0 submissions, 8 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 0 submissions, 7 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2024

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20102010-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20112011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20122012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC817
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC808
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC826
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC413
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC15114
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC10010
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC14014
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC808
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC707
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110

What Hacker News says

14 sources
eatonphil·Oct 21, 2021
I was surprised to see that ClickHouse and ElasticSearch have the same number of contributors. That's pretty astounding given how much older and more prominent ElasticSearch has been. https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/graphs/contributors https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/graphs/contributors Edit: I was very off. The Github contributor graph does not show all actual contributors. ElasticSearch has somewhere around 2-3 times as many contributors as ClickHouse.
In Comparing ClickHouse to PostgreSQL and TimescaleDB for time-series data
binarymax·Sep 9, 2021
Good point about MySQL/MariaDB. I think this is different though because search engines are at a big pivot point to include approximate-nearest-neighbor dense vector search (it has before been only sparse vector search for Lucene based platforms). Specifically, this feature https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/issues/42326#issuec... will be a big change for Elasticsearch. OpenSearch might try to mimic the API, but implementation details here will matter a lot, since this type of search is really picky when it comes to performance/recall balance. OpenDistro has already been working on their own version: https://opendistro.github.io/for-elasticsearch/features/knn.... ...so will they switch their API? Perhaps - but the results are going to be very different.
In Amazon Elasticsearch Service Is Now Amazon OpenSearch Service
hodgesrm·Jul 26, 2021
> How could you control code quality if you let randos write your stuff? You can't. Huh? You use the pull request mechanism on Github. That's what it's there for. If people want to contribute, the PR needs to be up to standards. Just to pick one example, Elastic uses this method for ElasticSearch. [1] ES gets PRs from hundreds of unique contributors each year. [1] https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pulls
In What license to use to prevent AWS et al. from selling my project as a service?
jval43·Jan 19, 2021
No, you are both correct. You are talking about the SSPL, the parent poster you are replying to is talking about the Elastic License which does in fact prevent you from modifying the code and running it in production: See 2.2 Restrictions: https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/master/license... With the dual-licensing you have a choice of Elastic license or SSPL, but they both have terms you might not like. And if you use the binaries you automatically use the free as in beer Elastic license.
In Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing
hodgesrm·Jan 19, 2021
> It doesn't matter what they say, read the license. I would love to but the terms within the ElasticSearch codebase on Github are quite confusing. Here's the text of the LICENCE.TXT file. Source code in this repository is covered by one of three licenses: (i) the Apache License 2.0 (ii) an Apache License 2.0 compatible license (iii) the Elastic License. The default license throughout the repository is Apache License 2.0 unless the header specifies another license. Elastic Licensed code is found only in the x-pack directory. The build produces two sets of binaries - one set that falls under the Elastic License and another set that falls under Apache License 2.0. The binaries that contain `-oss` in the artifact name are licensed under Apache License 2.0 and these binaries do not package any code from the x-pack directory
Read the rest
. Aside from not showing copies of the applicable licenses, it seems you have to read the code headers to determine which source file has which license. There are a lot of ways to respond to competitive threats from Amazon, but this approach is increasingly chaotic the closer you look. [1] https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/master/LICENSE...
In Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing
motives·Jan 19, 2021
Quoting another earlier comment from an elasticsearch thread here, credits to user _msw_ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25783509): https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/61400 https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/59563 https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/57271 https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/53643 . None of the above appear to be related to AWS specific APIs and offer a small sample of total contributions from AWS employees.
In Amazon: Not OK – Why we had to change Elastic licensing
_msw_·Jan 14, 2021
Disclosure: I work for AWS, but I do not work directly on Elasticsearch related services. Elasticsearch is/was an "upstream" for Open Distro for Elasticsearch (which is a distribution / collection of software). As an "upstream", changes to the core Apache 2.0 licensed software was sent as pull requests to Elastic, which are usually merged. It isn't correct to say that AWS has not been contributing to the upstream Elasticsearch code under an Apache 2.0 license (and, also, signing the CLA to boot, which allows Elastic to relicense AWS contributions under SSPL). Here's a sample of PRs from AWS developers that I could find: https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/61400 https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/59563 https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/57271 https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/53643
In Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana

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