This document provides an overview of Elasticsearch, including why search engines are useful, what Elasticsearch is, how it works, and some key concepts. Elasticsearch is an open source, distributed, real-time search and analytics engine. It facilitates full-text search across numerous data types and returns results based on relevance. It stores data in JSON documents and uses inverted indexes to enable fast full-text search. Documents are analyzed and tokenized to build the indexes. Elasticsearch can be queried using RESTful APIs or the query DSL to perform complex searches and return highlighted results.