When Elasticsearch is overkill for Bitrix e-commerce
I wrote about why Elasticsearch is a UX tool, not just a speed layer. Since then, three clients have asked me the same question.
Search and catalog
Catalog search judged by revenue: Elasticsearch mapping, synonyms and Russian morphology, typos, facets, autocomplete, zero-downtime reindexing and zero-result logs. Plus the cases where plain SQL is enough.
14 articles
Vector Search for E-commerce Catalogs: When It Works, When It's Overhead
A vendor pitched vector search for our catalog. 40,000 SKUs. Elasticsearch already running — fuzzy configured, synonyms tuned, function_score boosting by margin and stock.
Zero-Downtime Elasticsearch Reindex: How to Update Mapping Without Stopping Your Store
We needed to add a Russian morphology analyzer to an index with 80,000 products. I had no plan for how to do it live.
Elasticsearch Mapping Is Architecture, Not Configuration
For three weeks we couldn't figure out why the price filter wasn't working. Elasticsearch was up. Queries were coming in. Results were returning. But the price range — say, $15 to $50 — was being ignored completely. Products at $180 and $3 showed up side by side.
Relevance isn't revenue: teaching Elasticsearch to rank by business metrics
We ran an A/B test. The control group ranked search results by text relevance. The test group used a scoring function that factored in margin, stock levels, and sell-through rate. Click-through was nearly identical. Revenue per search session was 12% higher in the business-ranked variant.
Your Search Logs Are the Best Product Doc You're Not Reading
A client asked: "What are our customers actually searching for?" I pulled up Elasticsearch and exported the top 40 zero-results queries from the past week. Three of them were exact product names. In stock. Just written differently than the catalog.
We rebuilt search three times. Autocomplete outperformed the first two combined.
We rebuilt search three times on one project.
3,000 Results Is Also Broken Search
Zero results is a red flag in the dashboard. Obvious. Gets filed as a bug.
When Elasticsearch Lies: Keeping Your Search Index Fresh When the Catalog Changes Daily
A customer searched, found what they needed, clicked — and got "out of stock." They left. Later, a support ticket: "your search is broken." I opened the logs. The search wasn't broken. It returned exactly what was in the index an hour ago.
"Socks" and "knee-highs" are the same product. Elasticsearch didn't know.
Three weeks of Elasticsearch setup (shards, replicas, mappings, custom tokenizers) got us to where fuzziness AUTO dropped zero-results from 22% to 11%. A real improvement. But 11% of searchers were still leaving empty-handed. I pulled the logs and found the problem wasn't typos. It was synonyms.
"Samsunk phone" returned zero results. I found it before the client did.
One of the first queries after we launched new search on a 28,000 SKU catalog: "samsunk phone."
Zero results as a product backlog: what your search logs are telling you
We added Elasticsearch to a 28,000 SKU catalog and assumed the hard part was done. Search works, products show up, response times are fine. A month later I opened the no-results query logs.
Filters that sell: what we changed and what it did to conversion
The color filter was there. It sat at position 22 in the sidebar.
Elasticsearch is not a fast database. It's a UX tool.
We spent three weeks on Elasticsearch. Two of those weeks were infrastructure: mapping, shards, replication, Russian morphology analyzers. Everything worked.