Evolution of Yelp’s Elasticsearch-based Ranking Platform
Channel: Salar Rahmanian
Date: 2019-08-05

This talk introduces Yelp’s new Elasticsearch-based search backend that serves billions of queries per year for tens of millions of unique users per month. In particular we discuss the challenges of transferring our existing complex custom Lucene-based ranking and text analysis functionality to Elasticsearch. We also highlight several new technologies such as our contributions to Learning to Rank that allow us to host machine learning models directly in Elasticsearch, as well as our Maptype plugin that enables our scoring logic to efficiently lookup sparse map-type data during query time.

Speakers: Guenther Starnberger, Umesh Dangat, Karthik Alle