Migrate to MongoDB's Full Text Search?

RickCarlino commented 5 years ago

When we started this project almost 6 years ago, full text search for Mongo was not that great.

In 2019, Mongo's full text search seems "good enough" for our use cases.
We are using an extremely outdated version of ElasticSearch which will be time consuming to upgrade.
ElasticSearch increases our hosting costs because we need to pay a third party vendor to host a database, on top of the fees we already pay for MongoDB hosting.
Crop and Guide are the only models that use full text search. The application has very little need for full-text search outside of those use cases.
ElasticSearch complicates our setup, confuses new contributors and has historically been problematic during dep upgrades.

For the issues noted above, I am recommending that we get off of ElasticSearch and replace all #search() functionality with MongDB full text search.

RickCarlino commented 5 years ago

Forgot to CC @Br3nda for commentary.

Br3nda commented 5 years ago

Is it as good as elastic search? the other option is to upgrade our version of elastic search - there's some really nice functionality we get from searchkick gem on growstuff that finds misspellings, ranks results by popularity (tomato being more commonly planted than tomatillo) and knows about plurals in a dozen languages (searches for "Lillies" finds "lily").

RickCarlino commented 5 years ago

@Br3nda I'm certain it won't be as good as Elastic, but I do think it will be "good enough" for the amount of search we are doing today, with the added benefit of a simplified dev/ci environment, fewer external deps, lower hosting costs, less headaches, etc.. I had some not-so-great luck during my last upgrade attempt, but can revisit it now that the other deps in the project are a bit more manageable (not the case during my last attempt).

openfarmcc / OpenFarm

Migrate to MongoDB's Full Text Search? #1063