Ingest for search use cases
Elastic Stack Serverless
This page covers ingest methods specifically for search use cases. If you're working with a different use case, refer to the ingestion overview for more options.
Search use cases usually focus on general content, typically text-heavy data that does not have a timestamp. This could be data like knowledge bases, website content, product catalogs, and more.
Once you've decided how to deploy Elastic, the next step is getting your content into Elasticsearch. Your choice of ingestion method depends on where your content lives and how you need to access it.
There are several methods to ingest data into Elasticsearch for search use cases. Choose one or more based on your requirements.
If you just want to do a quick test, you can load sample data into your Elasticsearch cluster using the UI.
You can use the _bulk API to add data to your Elasticsearch indices, using any HTTP client, including the Elasticsearch client libraries.
While the Elasticsearch APIs can be used for any data type, Elastic provides specialized tools that optimize ingestion for specific use cases.
You can use these specialized tools to add general content to Elasticsearch indices.
| Method | Description | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Web crawler | Programmatically discover and index content from websites and knowledge bases | Crawl public-facing web content or internal sites accessible via HTTP proxy |
| Search connectors | Third-party integrations to popular content sources like databases, cloud storage, and business applications | Choose from a range of Elastic-built connectors or build your own in Python using the Elastic connector framework |
| File upload | One-off manual uploads through the UI | Useful for testing or very small-scale use cases, but not recommended for production workflows |
You can also transform and enrich your content at ingest time using ingest pipelines.
The Elastic UI has a set of tools for creating and managing indices optimized for search use cases. You can also manage your ingest pipelines in this UI. Learn more in Ingest pipelines for search use cases.