One of the most common actions that we take when visiting any website is search. A common service that powers search for many sites is Elasticsearch - but what makes it so powerful? What can you do with Elasticsearch that you can’t with a regular database? This tutorial starts with an introduction to Elasticsearch architecture, including what makes it great for search and not so great for other use cases. We will then build an application together with a search engine powered by Elasticsearch. We will also discuss how to optimize search queries and scale as the volume of data increases.