ElasticSearch vs OpenSearch

[Tracy]

Both based upon the same code base. OpenSearch was forked from ES after Amazon and the ES developers butted heads about Amazon using it in an AWS offering and ES changed the licensing up to prohibit that type of action basically.
OpenSearch is based upon the ElasticSearch 7.x code base line. ElasticSearch is up to version 8.3.17.
Performance reports (unbiased) that I have seen shows that ElasticSearch outperforms Opensearch by noticeable amounts in most measured areas.

So the question is, for someone running their own VPS or dedicated server, why would you choose OpenSearch over ElasticSearch. Most probably don't need the fancy interface panel that costs extra in ES and comes standard in OpenSearch. So as for as a standalone user license, they are about the same.
I personally rather use the higher performing/smaller footprint ElasticSearch over OpenSearch.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

Search is something I've never really dived into.

I think it's more important when you get a bigger community, right?

 

[Tracy]

Search is something I've never really dived into.

I think it's more important when you get a bigger community, right?

Not always. I purchased (and use it) for the benefit it gives for two/three word searches.
When you have items in your niche that are like M1, M45, ZWO, ASI and such it helps since the default mySQL is set at 4 letter words if I remember correctly.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

Not always. I purchased (and use it) for the benefit it gives for two/three word searches.
When you have items in your niche that are like M1, M45, ZWO, ASI and such it helps since the default mySQL is set at 4 letter words if I remember correctly.

I wonder why XF can't just make their default search be able to handle 2–3-character words!

Is it a database thing?

 

[Tracy]

I wonder why XF can't just make their default search be able to handle 2–3-character words!

Is it a database thing?

Yes and no.
You can set up for mySQL to use two/three letter search terms. It is a config setting in the mysql config file and then you have to restart your mySQL server and then rebuild the search index to hopefully enable it.
Frequently on shared hosting, you don't have that ability to set your mysql configuration to use less than what the provider has (normally 3 or 4 letter).



But even then, mySQL sucks for search results when compared to ES/OpenSearch. There are other features that ES/OpenSearch bring to the table over mySQL searches. The biggest is faster searches and reduced storage of the search index.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

I wonder why MySQL hasn't fixed this in future updates. If I were a betting man, I'd bet that it has been a long requested feature!

 

[Tracy]

I wonder why MySQL hasn't fixed this in future updates. If I were a betting man, I'd bet that it has been a long requested feature!

it's easy enough to do 2 letter searches by changing your my.conf and adding

[mysqld]
innodb_ft_min_token_size=2
ft_min_word_len=2

The above needs to be in the mysqld section of the config file as denoted.
You then need to rebuild your XF search index after setting the Search Minimum Word Length to 2 in the XF ACP.
The only issue is mySQL searches suck even at that due to the stop words.