Elasticsearch in Action

Appendix E. Turning search upside down with the percolator

The Elasticsearch percolator is typically defined as “search upside down” for the following reasons:

• You index queries instead of documents. This registers the query in memory, so it can be quickly run later.
• You send a document to Elasticsearch instead of a query. This is called percolating a document, basically indexing it into a small, in-memory index. Registered queries are run against the small index, so Elasticsearch finds out which queries match.
• You get back a list of queries matching the document, instead of the other way around like a regular search.

The typical use case for percolation is alerting. As shown in figure E.1, you can notify users when new documents (matching ...