How do you choose the right search tool?

I can see from the README that Elasticsearch is your proposed search tool. I am currently researching a new search tool for an e-commerce platform and wanting to learn about the good, the bad and the ugly of what's on offer.

**The things I'm considering are:**
- it can be paid for (but I will be weighing up value for money)
- it needs to be future-proof (ideally we don't want to replace this again in a few years time!)
- it needs to be relatively quick to set up (2-3 months) and not require large amounts of ongoing support
- it needs to have a business-facing UI so that merchandisers etc. can add new filters etc. without requiring an engineer
- it needs to offer a great user experience e.g. synonym detection, typo tolerance, personalisation of search results etc.

And this is where wading through 3rd parties starts to get a bit tougher because of the number of buzzwords out there and everyone trademarking their own 'unique' algorithm 🤯

Typesense have created this [lovely feature comparison table ](https://typesense.org/typesense-vs-algolia-vs-elasticsearch-vs-meilisearch
)which is the clearest representation I've seen so far.

It says of Elasticsearch:
> Elasticsearch is a large piece of software, that takes non-trivial amount of effort to setup, administer, scale and fine-tune. It offers you a few thousand configuration parameters to get to your ideal configuration. So it's better suited for large teams who have the bandwidth to get it production-ready, regularly monitor it and scale it, especially when they have a need to store billions of documents and petabytes of data (eg: logs).

I've looked a little into [Klevu](https://www.klevu.com/), [Constructor.io](https://constructor.io/), [Algolia](https://www.algolia.com/) and Typesense.

**The questions in my head are:**
- Is end to end vector search really worth paying for? (rather than keyword search)
- What makes these companies different from one another?

Any thoughts on any of the above would be greatly appreciated to help me choose the right search tool. I think that vector search certainly seems to offer some interesting potential for new features for the e-commerce site. However, with companies making their pricing so opaque, I'm trying to discern how much is worth paying for and what that cost will be!

@nelsonic, @SimonLab, @RobStallion, @samhstn, don't suppose you've got any thoughts on this one?