Atlas Search

13 results

THL Simplifies Architecture with MongoDB Atlas Search

Tourism Holdings Limited (THL) originally became a MongoDB customer in 2019, using MongoDB Atlas to help manage a wide variety of telematics data. I was very excited to welcome Charbel Abdo, Solutions Architect for THL at MongoDB .local Sydney in July 2024 to hear more about how the company has significantly expanded its use of MongoDB. The largest RV rental company in the world, THL has branches in New Zealand (where it is headquartered), Australia, the US, Canada, the UK and Europe. Specializing in building, renting, and selling camper vans, THL has a number of well-known brands under its umbrella. In recent years, THL has made a number of significant digital transformation and technology stack optimization efforts, moving from a ‘bolt-on’ approach that necessitated the use of a distributed search and analytics engine to an integrated search solution with MongoDB Atlas . THL operates a complex ecosystem managed by their in-house platform, Motek, which handles booking, pricing, fleet management, and more—with MongoDB Atlas as the central database. Its +7,000 RVs are fitted with telematics devices that send information—such as location, high-speed events, engine problems, and geofences or restricted areas (for example, during the Australian bushfires of 2020)—to vehicles’ onboard computers. THL initially used a bolt-on approach for complex search functionalities by extending their deployment footprint to include a stand-alone instance of Elasticsearch. This setup, while functional, introduced significant data synchronization and performance issues, as well as increased maintenance overhead. Elasticsearch struggled under heavy loads which led to critical failures and system instability, resulting in THL experiencing frequent outages and data inconsistencies. After two years of coping with these challenges, THL resolved to migrate away from ElasticSearch. After doing due diligence, they identified the MongoDB developer data platform’s integrated Search capabilities as the optimum solution. "A couple of months later, we had migrated everything," said Abdo. "Kudos to the MongoDB account team. They were exceptional." The migration process turned out to be relatively straightforward. By iteratively replacing Elasticsearch with MongoDB Atlas Search , THL was able to simplify its architecture, reduce costs, and eliminate the synchronization issues that had plagued the system. The simplification also led to significant performance and reliability improvements. Because it no longer needed the dedicated sync resources processing millions upon millions of records per day, THL was able to turn off its Elasticsearch cluster and to consolidate its resources. “All data sync related issues were gone, eliminated. But also we got our Friday afternoons back, which is always a good thing!” added Abdo. Abdo’s team can now also use existing monitoring tools rather than having to set up something completely separate from the standalone search engine they were using. “Sometimes, changes are easier than you think,” said Abdo. “We spent two-and-a-half years with our faulty solutions just looking for ways to patch up all the problems that we were having. We tried everything except actually looking into how much it would actually take to migrate. We wasted so much time, so much effort, so much money. While if we had thought about this a couple of years ago, it would have been a breeze.” “Over-engineering is bad, simple is better,” he noted. To learn more about how MongoDB Atlas Search can help you build or deepen your search capabilities, visit our MongoDB Atlas Search page .

October 7, 2024

Top Use Cases for Text, Vector, and Hybrid Search

Search is how we discover new things. Whether you’re looking for a pair of new shoes, the latest medical advice, or insights into corporate data, search provides the means to unlock the truth. Search habits—and the accompanying end-user expectations—have evolved along with changes to the search experiences offered by consumer apps like Google and Amazon. The days of the standard of 10 blue links may well be behind us, as new paradigms like vector search and generative AI (gen AI) have upended long-held search norms. But are all forms of search created equal, or should we be seeking out the right “flavor” of search for specific jobs? In this blog post, we will define and dig into various flavors of search, including text, vector and AI-powered search, and hybrid search, and discuss when to use each, including sample use cases where one type of search might be superior to others. Information retrieval revolutionized with text search The concept of text search has been baked into user behavior from the early days of the web, with the rudimentary text box entry and 10 blue link results based on text relevance to the initial query. This behavior and associated business model has produced trillions in revenue and has become one of the fiercest battlegrounds across the internet . Text search allows users to quickly find specific information within a large set of data by entering keywords or phrases. When a query is entered, the text search engine scans through indexed documents to locate and retrieve the most relevant results based on the keywords. Text search is a good solution for queries requiring exact matches where the overarching meaning isn't as critical. Some of the most common uses include: Catalog and content search: Using the search bar to find specific products or content based on keywords from customer inquiries. For example, a customer searching for "size 10 men trainers" or “installation guide” can instantly find the exact items they’re looking for, like how Nextar tapped into Atlas Search to enable physical retailers to create online catalogs. In-application search: This is well-suited for organizations with straightforward offerings to make it easier for users to locate key resources, but that don’t require advanced features like semantic retrieval or contextual re-ranking. For instance, if a user searches for "songs key of G," they can quickly receive relevant materials. This streamlines asset retrieval, allowing users to focus on the task they are trying to achieve and boosts overall satisfaction. For a company like Yousician , Atlas Search enabled their 20 million monthly active users to tackle their music lessons with ease. Customer 360: Unifying data from different sources to create a single, holistic view. Consolidated information such as user preferences, purchase history, and interaction data can be used to enhance business visibility and simplify the management, retrieval, and aggregation of user data. Consider a support agent searching for all information related to customer “John Doe." They can quickly access relevant attributes and interaction history, ensuring more accurate and efficient service. Helvetia was able to achieve success after migrating to MongoDB and using Atlas Search to deliver a single, 360-degree real-time view across all customer touchpoints and insurance products. AI and a new paradigm with vector search With advances in technology, vector search has emerged to help solve the challenge of providing relevant results even when the user may not know what they’re looking for. Vector search allows you to take any type of media or content, convert it into a vector using machine learning algorithms, and then search to find results similar to the target term. The similarity aspect is determined by converting your data into numerical high-dimensional vectors, and then calculating the distance between them to determine relevance—the closer the vector, the higher the relevance. There is a wide range of practical, powerful use cases powered by vector search—notably semantic search and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for gen AI. Semantic search focuses on meaning and prioritizes user intent by deciphering not just what users type but why they're searching, in order to provide more accurate and context-oriented search results. Some examples of semantic search include: Content/knowledge base search: Vast amounts of organizational data, structured and unstructured, with hidden insights, can benefit significantly from semantic search. Questions like “What’s our remote work policy?” can return accurate results even when the source materials do not contain the “remote” keyword, but rather have “return to office” or “hybrid” or other keywords. A real-world example of content search is the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia , which uses Atlas Vector Search to power semantic search across petabytes of text, audio, and visual content in its collections. Recommendation engines: Understanding users’ interests and intent is a strong competitive advantage–like how Netflix provides a personalized selection of shows and movies based on your watch history, or how Amazon recommends products based on your purchase history. This is particularly powerful in e-commerce, media & entertainment, financial services, and product/service-oriented industries where the customer experience tightly influences the bottom line. A success story is Delivery Hero , which leverages vector search-powered real-time recommendations to increase customer satisfaction and revenue. Anomaly detection: Identifying and preventing fraud, security breaches, and other system anomalies is paramount for all organizations. By grouping similar vectors and using vector search to identify outliers, potential threats can be detected early, enabling timely responses. Companies like VISO TRUST and Extrac are among the innovators that build their core offerings using semantic search for security and risk management. With the rise of large language models (LLMs), vector search is increasingly becoming essential in gen AI application development. It augments LLMs by providing domain-specific context outside of what the LLMs “know,” ensuring relevance and accuracy of the gen AI output. In this case, the semantic search outputs are used to enhance RAG. By providing relevant information from a vector database, vector search helps the RAG model generate responses that are more contextually relevant. By grounding the generated text in factual information, vector search helps reduce hallucinations and improve the accuracy of the response. Some common RAG applications are for chatbots and virtual assistants, which provide users with relevant responses and carry out tasks based on the user query, delivering enhanced user experience. Two real-world examples of such chatbot implementations are from our customers Okta and Kovai . Another popular application is using RAG to help generate content like articles, blog posts, scripts, code, and more, based on user prompts or data. This significantly accelerates content production, allowing organizations including Novo Nordisk and Scalestack to save time and produce content at scale, all at an accuracy level that was not possible without RAG. Beyond RAG, an emerging vector search usage is in agentic systems . Such a system is an architecture encompassing one or more AI agents with autonomous decision-making capabilities, able to access and use various system components and resources to achieve defined objectives while adapting to environmental feedback. Vector search enables efficient and semantically meaningful information retrieval in these systems, facilitating relevant context for LLMs, optimized tool selection, semantic understanding, and improved relevance ranking. Hybrid search: The best of both worlds Hybrid search combines the strengths of text search with the advanced capabilities of vector search to deliver more accurate and relevant search results. Hybrid search shines in scenarios where there's a need for both precision (where text search excels) and recall (where vector search excels), and where user queries can vary from simple to complex, including both keyword and natural language queries. Hybrid search delivers a more comprehensive, flexible information retrieval process, helping RAG models access a wider range of relevant information. For example, in a customer support context, hybrid search can ensure that the RAG model retrieves not only documents containing exact keywords but also semantically similar content, resulting in more informative and helpful responses. Hybrid search can also help reduce information overload by prioritizing the most relevant results. This allows RAG models to focus on processing and understanding the most critical information, leading to faster, more accurate responses, and improving the user experience. Powering your AI and search applications with MongoDB As your organization continues to innovate in the rapidly evolving technology ecosystem, building robust AI and search applications supporting customer, employee, and stakeholder experiences can deliver powerful competitive advantages. With MongoDB, you can efficiently deploy full-text search , vector search , and hybrid search capabilities. Start building today—simplify your developer experience while increasing impact in MongoDB’s fully-managed, secure vector database, integrated with a vast AI partner ecosystem , including all major cloud providers, generative AI model providers, and system integrators. Head over to our quick-start guide to get started with Atlas Vector Search today.

September 16, 2024

Atlas Search Nodes: Now with Multi-Region Availability

At MongoDB, we are continually refining our products to try and create the simplest and most seamless developer experience possible. This mantra has also been applicable to how we think about search, from the beginning with Atlas Text Search, to the announcement of the next paradigm with Atlas Vector Search. We have continued to expand this vision with the introduction of Search Nodes, initially launching on AWS , and then expanding to both Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure . Today we’re excited to take the next step in that journey with the announcement of multi-region availability on all three major cloud providers. Search Nodes: Isolation and scale As a quick refresher, Search Nodes provide dedicated infrastructure for Atlas Search and Vector Search workloads, enabling even greater control over search workloads. They also allow you to isolate and optimize compute resources to scale search and database needs independently, delivering better performance at scale and higher availability. Since our announcements, we’ve been thrilled with the excitement around Search Nodes and the desire for better control, flexibility, and availability for scaling both Atlas Search and Vector Search workloads. Incorporating Search Nodes into your deployment delivers workload isolation, and the ability to optimize resource usage. A visual of the evolution from the previous coupled architecture to dedicated nodes is shown below: Figure 1: Improved workload sizing alignment and enhanced scalability with Search Nodes Introducing Global Availability Another tenet of our builder's journey is making sure the flexibility, scalability, and performance with Search Nodes are available to everyone, regardless of the cloud you’re using or cloud region. Today, we’re excited to officially announce multi-region availability for Search Nodes to allow anyone to better optimize resource usage regardless of location. Now, with multi-region availability, you can take full advantage of global scalability by no longer being limited to one geographic area. Furthermore, you now have the peace of mind by having the redundancy needed to protect yourself in the case of any unforeseen outage event, whether due to technical issues or natural disasters that could cause data center downtime. Figure 2: Multi-region availability on all three major cloud providers Here is a quick video tutorial about how to enable Search Nodes, as well as take advantage of multi-region availability: Brief tutorial on how to enable multi-region Search Nodes With today’s announcements we’re excited to bring the power and control of dedicated Search Nodes to people using all clouds and regions across the globe. We’re excited to see the continued adoption and improved results from having greater ubiquity across your search implementations. As always, reach out to us with any feedback, as we’d love to hear what you think!

August 14, 2024

A New Way to Query: Introducing the Atlas Search Playground

Today, MongoDB is thrilled to announce the launch of a brand new sandbox environment for Atlas Search. The Atlas Search Playground offers developers an unparalleled opportunity to quickly experiment, iterate, and collaborate on search indexes and queries, reducing the operational overhead throughout the entire software development lifecycle. What is the Atlas Search Playground? The Atlas Search Playground is a sandbox environment where you can explore the power and versatility of Atlas Search without needing to set up a full Atlas collection or waiting for your search index to build. It provides an instantaneous and frictionless way to experiment with creating indexes and crafting search queries on your own data—all in a single, user-friendly interface that requires no prior experience or account setup. Key Features: Instant access: No need to sign up or log in. Simply visit the Playground Environment page and start exploring immediately. Playground workspace: A dedicated workspace where you can add and modify data to work with, create, edit, and test search indexes, and test search queries in real-time. Pre-configured templates: Access a variety of sample templates to simulate real-world scenarios and test your search skills against diverse use cases. Shareable snapshots: Easily share your experiments and findings with colleagues or collaborators using unique URLs generated for each session. Just press Share to generate your unique Snapshot URL to share your pre-configured environment. A shareable snapshot from the Playground Ready to move into Atlas Search? Once you’re ready to move into Atlas, just click on the Go To Atlas button to sign up or log into your existing Atlas account. Once you are in Atlas, you can: Create a project, cluster, database, and collection to use with Atlas Search Tip! To use the documents from the Playground, select Add Documents and paste in the array of documents that you want to add. Create a search index Under the Data Services tab, click on the cluster name and navigate to the Atlas Search tab. Follow the setup instructions to create a search index. Tip! To use the search index from the Playground, select the JSON editor configuration method and paste in your index definition. Run a query Click on the name of your index, and select Search Tester from the navigation menu. Tip! To use the query from the Playground, click Edit $search query to open the query editor and paste in the query. If the query has multiple stages, click on visit the aggregation pipeline . Already an Atlas user? If you're already using Atlas Search, you can easily set up the Atlas Search Playground to match your existing configurations. All you have to do is copy and paste your documents, search index definitions, and queries into the corresponding editor panels. Ready, Set, Play Ready to embark on your search journey? Visit the Atlas Search Playground now and unleash the full potential of Atlas Search. Whether you're a seasoned pro or a curious novice, there's something for everyone to discover without the need for any setup. To learn more about the Atlas Search Playground, visit our documentation . And be sure to share what you think in our user feedback portal .

May 29, 2024

How the NFSA is Using MongoDB Atlas and AI to Make Aussie Culture Accessible

Where can you find everything from facts about Kylie Minogue, to more than 6,000 Australian home movies, to a 60s pop group playing a song with a drum-playing kangaroo ? The NFSA! Founded in 1935, the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA) is one of the oldest archives of its kind in the world. It is tasked with collecting, preserving, and sharing Australia’s audiovisual culture. According to its website, the NFSA “represents not only [Australia’s] technical and artistic achievements, but also our stories, obsessions and myths; our triumphs and sorrows; who we were, are, and want to be.” The NFSA’s collection includes petabytes of audiovisual data—including broadcast-quality news footage, TV shows, and movies, high-resolution photographs, radio shows, and video games—plus millions of physical and contextual items like costumes, scripts, props, photographs, and promotional materials, all tucked away in a warehouse. “Today, we have eight petabytes of data, and our data is growing from one to two petabytes each year,” said Shahab Qamar, software engineering manager at NFSA. Making this wealth of data easily accessible to users across Australia (not to mention all over the world) has led to a number of challenges, which is where MongoDB Atlas—which helps developers simplify and accelerate building with data—comes in. Check out our AI resource page to learn more about building AI-powered apps with MongoDB. Don’t change (but apply a few updates) Because of its broad appeal, the NFSA's collection website alone receives an average of 100,000 visitors each month. When Qamar joined the NFSA in 2020, he saw an opportunity to improve the organization’s web platform. His aim was to ensure the best possible experience for the site’s high number of daily visitors, which had begun to plateau. This included a website refresh, as well as addressing technical issues related to handling site traffic, due to the site being hosted on on-premises servers. The site also wasn’t “optimized for Google Analytics,” said Qamar. In fact, the NFSA website was invisible to Google and other search engines, so he knew it was time for a significant update, which also presented an opportunity to set up strong data foundations to build deeper capabilities down the line. But first, Qamar and team needed to find a setup that could serve the needs of the NFSA and Australia’s 26 million residents more robustly than their previous solution. Specifically, Qamar said, the NFSA was looking for a fully managed database that could also implement search at scale, as well as a system that his small team of five could easily manage. It also needed to ensure high levels of resiliency and the ability to work with more than one cloud provider. The previous NFSA site also didn’t support content delivery networks , he added. MongoDB Atlas supported all of the use cases the NFSA was looking for, Qamar said, including the ability to support multi-cloud hosting. And because Atlas is fully managed, it would readily meet the NFSA's requirements. In July 2023, after months of development, the new and greatly improved NFSA website was launched. The redesign was immediately impactful: Since the NFSA’s redesigned site was launched, the number of users visiting the collection search website has gone up 200%, and content requests—which the NFSA access team responds to on a case-by-case basis—have gone up 16%. (Getting search) back in black While the previous version of the NFSA site included search, the prior functionality was prone to crashing, and the quality of the results was often poor, Qamar said. For example, search results were delivered alphabetically rather than based on relevance, and the previous search didn’t support fine-tuning of relevance based on matches in specific fields. So, as part of its site redesign, the NFSA was looking to add full text search, relevance-based search results, faceting, and pagination. MongoDB Atlas Search —which integrates the database, search engine, and sync mechanism into a single, unified, fully managed platform—ticked all of those boxes. A search results page on the NFSA website Indeed, the NFSA compared search results from its old site to its new MongoDB Atlas site and “found that MongoDB Atlas-based searches were more relevant and targeted,” Qamar said. Previously, configuring site search required manual coding and meant downtime for the site, he noted. “The whole setup wasn’t very developer friendly and, therefore, a barrier to working efficiently with search configuration and fine-tuning,” Qamar said. In comparison, MongoDB Atlas allowed for simple configuration and fine-tuning of the NFSA's search requirements. The NFSA has also been using MongoDB Atlas Charts . Charts help the NFSA easily visualize its collection by custom grouping (like production year or genre), as well as helping the NFSA see which items are most popular with users. “Charts have helped us understand how our collection is growing and evolving over time,” Qamar said. NFSA’s use of MongoDB Charts Can’t get you (AI) out of my head Now, the NFSA—inspired by Qamar’s own training in machine learning and the broad interest in all things AI—is exploring how it can use Atlas Vector Search and generative AI tools to allow users to explore content buried in the NFSA collection. One example cited is putting transcriptions of audiovisual files in NFSA’s collection into a vector database for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). The NFSA has approximately 27 years worth—meaning, it would take 27 years to play it all back—of material to transcribe, and is currently developing a model to accurately capture the Australian dialect so the work is transcribed correctly. Ultimately, the NFSA is interested in building a RAG-powered AI bot to provide historically and contextually accurate information about work in the NFSA’s archive. The NFSA is also exploring how it can use RAG to deliver accurate, conversation-like search results without training large language models itself, and whether it can leverage AI to help restore some of the older videos in its collection. Qamar and team are also interested in vectorizing audio-visual material for semantic analysis and genre-based classification of collection material at scale, he said. “Historically, we’ve been very metadata-driven and keyword-driven, and I think that’s a missed opportunity. Because when we talk about what an archive does, we archive stories,” Qamar said of the possibilities offered by vectors. “An example I use is, what if the world ended tomorrow? And what if aliens came to Earth and only saw our metadata, what image of Australia would they see? Is that a true image of what Australia is really like?” Qamar said. “How content is described is important, but content’s imagery, the people in it, and the audio and words being spoken are really important. Full-text search can take you somewhere along the way, but vector search allows you to look things up in a semantic manner. So it’s more about ideas and concepts than very specific keywords,” he said. If you’re interested in learning how MongoDB helps accelerate and simplify time-to-mission for federal, state, and local governments, defense agencies, education, and across the public sector, check out MongoDB for Public Sector . Check out MongoDB Atlas Vector Search to learn more about how Vector Search helps organizations like the NFSA build applications powered by semantic search and gen AI. Head over to our quick-start guide to get started with Atlas Vector Search today. *Note that this story’s subheads come from Australian song titles!

May 14, 2024

Workload Isolation for More Scalability and Availability: Search Nodes Now on Google Cloud

June 25, 2024: Announcing Search Nodes in general availability on Microsoft Azure Today we’re excited to take the next step in bringing scalable, dedicated architecture to your search experiences with the introduction of Atlas Search Nodes, now in general availability for Google Cloud. This post is also available in: Deutsch , Français , Español , Português , Italiano , 한국어 , 简体中文 . Since our initial announcement of Search Nodes in June of 2023, we’ve been rapidly accelerating access to the most scalable dedicated architecture, starting with general availability on AWS and now expanding to general availability on Google Cloud. We'd like to give you a bit more context on what Search Nodes are and why they're important to any search experience running at scale. Search Nodes provide dedicated infrastructure for Atlas Search and Vector Search workloads to enable even greater control over search workloads. They also allow you to isolate and optimize compute resources to scale search and database needs independently, delivering better performance at scale and higher availability. One of the last things developers want to deal with when building and scaling apps is having to worry about infrastructure problems. Any downtime or poor user experiences can result in lost users or revenue, especially when it comes to your database and search experience. This is one of the reasons developers turn to MongoDB, given the ease of use of having one unified system for your database and search solution. With the introduction of Atlas Search Nodes, we’ve taken the next step in providing our builders with ultimate control, giving them the ability to remain flexible by scaling search workloads without the need to over-provision the database. By isolating your search and database workloads while at the same time automatically keeping your search cluster data synchronized with operational data, Atlas Search and Atlas Vector Search eliminate the need to run a separate ETL tool, which takes time and effort to set up and is yet another fail point for your scaling app. This provides superior performance and higher availability while reducing architectural complexity and wasted engineering time recovering from sync failures. In fact, we’ve seen a 40% to 60% decrease in query time for many complex queries, while eliminating the chances of any resource contention or downtime. With just a quick button click, Search Nodes on Google Cloud offer our existing Atlas Search and Vector Search users the following benefits: Higher availability Increased scalability Workload isolation Better performance at scale Improved query performance We offer both compute-heavy search-specific nodes for relevance-based text search, as well as a memory-optimized option that is optimal for semantic and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) production use cases with Atlas Vector Search. This makes resource contention or availability issues a thing of the past. Search Nodes are easy to opt into and set up — to start, jump on into the MongoDB UI and follow the steps do the following: Navigate to your “Database Deployments” section in the MongoDB UI Click the green “+Create” button On the “Create New Cluster” page, change the radio button for Google Cloud for “Multi-cloud, multi-region & workload isolation” to enable Toggle the radio button for “Search Nodes for workload isolation” to enable. Select the number of nodes in the text box Check the agreement box Click “Create cluster” For existing Atlas Search users, click “Edit Configuration” in the MongoDB Atlas Search UI and enable the toggle for workload isolation. Then the steps are the same as noted above. Jump straight into our docs to learn more! Head over to our quick-start guide to get started with Atlas Vector Search today.

March 28, 2024

Introducing a Local Experience for Atlas, Atlas Search, and Atlas Vector Search with the Atlas CLI

This post is also available in: Deutsch , Français , Español , Português . Today, MongoDB is pleased to announce in Public Preview a new set of features for building software locally with MongoDB Atlas, giving developers greater flexibility and reducing operational overhead throughout the entire software development lifecycle. Developers can now develop locally with MongoDB Atlas deployments, including Atlas Search and Vector Search , using the Atlas CLI , empowering them to create full-text search or AI-powered applications no matter their preferred environment for building with MongoDB. Developers can use the Atlas CLI to set up, connect to, and automate common management tasks from early development through testing, staging, and production. For full-text search use cases, developers can now use the Atlas CLI to create and manage Atlas Search indexes regardless of whether they are working locally or in the cloud. Similarly, developers building applications powered by semantic search and generative AI on MongoDB can now use the Atlas CLI to create and manage local development instances with Vector Search indexes regardless of their development environment. Developer time is one of the most precious commodities in any organization building innovative new application experiences. But all too frequently, developers are burdened with managing repeatable tasks such as setting up development environments. They also often have to wrestle with the cognitive overhead of switching between different user experiences for local versus cloud development, distracting from delivering value. By giving developers the power of Atlas at their fingertips no matter their preferred development environment, MongoDB continues to expand the scope and capabilities of its developer data platform while placing a premium on developer experience. Create a Local Atlas Database Ready to create a local Atlas database, but don’t have the Atlas CLI yet? It’s easy to install with your favorite package manager. To install the Atlas CLI with Homebrew, use the following command: brew install mongodb-atlas In addition to installing via the Homebrew package manager, you can install the MongoDB Atlas CLI via Apt, Yum, Chocolatey, directly downloading the binary, or pulling the Docker image (learn more about our documentation ). You can also download it directly from the MongoDB Download Center . To create a local Atlas deployment with default settings in interactive mode, enter: atlas deployments setup --type local If you want to list your Atlas deployments enter: atlas deployments list If you’re authenticated to Atlas, you will see both your local and cloud Atlas deployments. If you aren’t authenticated to Atlas, you will only see your local deployments. Get Started with Local Atlas Search Building an application with a full-text search feature powered by Atlas Search? If you’re a developer who tends to build and prototype locally, you may be interested in using the Atlas CLI to work with Atlas Search in your local environment. To get started, first, connect to the local deployment on which you’d like to create a Search index: atlas deployments connect Next, you can use the MongoDB Shell to create your Search index. Below you’ll see an example of how to create an Atlas Search index: db.YOURCOLLECTION.createSearchIndex( "example-index", { mappings: { dynamic: true } } ) Then, if you want to run a query you can use the $search stage of an aggregation pipeline. You can learn more about managing Atlas Search indexes in our documentation . Get Started with Local Vector Search If you’re building an application with generative AI or semantic search and MongoDB Atlas, chances are you’ll be interested in our Atlas Vector Search offering. And now with the Atlas CLI, you can work with Vector Search in the cloud and your local environment. To get started with Vector Search locally you can use MongoDB Shell to create a Vector Search index. Notice that this is similar to the Atlas Search example above, except that in this case there is a vector embedding accounted for in search index creation. db.YOURCOLLECTION.createSearchIndex({ "mappings": { "dynamic": true, "fields": { "plot_embedding": { "type": "knnVector", "dimensions": 1536, "similarity": "euclidean" } } } } ) To learn more about running Vector Search queries visit our documentation . Additionally, if you're already familiar with handling your cloud Search indexes using the Atlas CLI, you'll appreciate a fresh set of interactive commands designed to help you efficiently manage Atlas Search and Vector Search indexes both locally and in the cloud: atlas deployments search indexes create From there you can move through an interactive flow that guides you through index creation. For detailed instructions visit our tutorial . Ready to Move to the Cloud? If you’re ready to create an Atlas database in the cloud, that is easy to do with the Atlas CLI. Simply use the following command: atlas deployments setup --type atlas From there, the setup wizard will guide you to: Register for an Atlas account or authenticate to an existing account Create a free MongoDB Atlas database Load sample data Add your IP address to the access list Create a database user and password Connect to the cluster using the MongoDB Shell ( mongosh ) so you can begin interacting with your data To learn more about the Atlas CLI, visit our documentation . And be sure to let us know what you think of the Atlas CLI in our user feedback portal . With the new local experience with the Atlas CLI, it’s easier than ever to work with your data on Atlas no matter your preferred development environment. Get started today with the Atlas CLI as the ultimate developer tool to manage MongoDB Atlas, including Atlas Search and Vector Search, throughout the entire software development lifecycle, from your local environment all the way to the cloud. Head over to our <a href="https://www.mongodb.com/docs/atlas/atlas-vector-search/tutorials/vector-search-quick-start/?tck=ai_as_web to get started with Atlas Vector Search today.

September 26, 2023

Three Ways Retailers Use Search Beyond the Ecommerce Store

When consumers think of retail search, the first thing that comes to mind is typically the search bar of an ecommerce website. This is for a good reason: a Salesforce commerce study shows that 87% of shoppers begin their shopping journey in the search bar, and Forrester has found that as many as 68% of shoppers would not return to a site that provided a poor experience. But retailers that exclusively focus on search capabilities in the context of ecommerce are missing out on huge benefits in customer experience and workforce efficiency. To drive fast application experiences, the querying and indexing of data sets is vitally important, and can be a game changer for easy performance optimization. Let’s explore some of the innovative ways that retailers are using search indexes to super-power their application experiences. Why search is important across retail organizations Large retail data sets, like product and customer data, are used by both customer-facing ecommerce or loyalty applications and internal use cases: inventory management, stock management, customer care, purchasing, supplier and vendor management, marketing and more. Customers using ecommerce search bars typically have an excellent “Google-like” experience with auto-complete, faceting, fuzzy matching, etc., but the retail workforce and back office staff often aren't given the same luxury. These internal teams are trying to work efficiently, but they are stuck using front ends powered by a traditional operational database with no search indexing capabilities. These teams are missing out on a search engine that is optimized for unknown or unpredictable workloads. Search indexing will speed up queries where the input is user-defined or might be searching across multiple fields. Let’s look at a comparison: FIgure 1: Database Query vs. Search Query For these under-served and often overlooked use cases, retailers need a quick and cost-effective solution to adding search, like MongoDB Atlas Search. Adding a search index to an application can be done in minutes, without creating operational complexity. MongoDB manages the spin up and management of the backend Apache Lucene search engine, and the complex data and index synchronization activity. Figure 2: MongoDB Atlas: Integrated database and search The three most common use cases for retail The easy addition of search can optimize application performance and usability in the retail industry in three important areas: In-store workforce applications Back office inventory and assortment Customer servicing Figure 3: Example Search use cases in three retail industry areas In-store workforce applications Speed is important in workforce applications, because these interactions happen in real time. Think of an in-store customer spelling out a name in full at checkout for a grocery purchase to be added to a loyalty account. This could add five minutes to a checkout experience, disincentivizing the customer to engage with the loyalty program. Now imagine that the same checkout attendant can identify the customer by any number of data points, not only loyalty number, but also name, first line of address, email, etc., with faster lookup through auto-complete and fuzzy matching. A retailer that MongoDB works with does this auto-lookup in store with Atlas Search in 200-300 milliseconds for optimum customer satisfaction. Customers and staff also can have difficulty remembering or correctly identifying products. A DIY amateur or a new employee can’t be expected to know the exact name or product ID. This is a great use case for search indexing as we do not know the field in the document or the product attribute that we are querying against. MongoDB has customers that stock more than 150 million products. Strong typo tolerance makes life easier for everyone. Back-office inventory and assortment Flawless purchasing and stock management ensures brick and mortar and online stores get the right inventory at the right time to maximize sales and reduce wastage or deadstock. An operator responsible for distributing products into categories will define in which store shelf a product needs to be and adjust this depending on customer behavior and contractual changes with the supplier. Inventory applications will be used on a daily basis by every operator. These are small internal applications that can have a huge impact on the overall business, but are often overlooked by large IT programs for budget or have a smaller IT team. These teams are adopting Atlas Search because they can get it up and running in as few as three weeks and fully integrated into their application without taking on more operational overhead. Customer servicing Long call center or chat conversations wait times have high operational costs and cause customer churn. It is vital to identify the customer as quickly as possible by the data they provide: order or customer ID, phone number, store address, etc. Retailers who have created a “Customer 360” across their customer relationship management and loyalty systems have created a large complex pool of data. The ability to run a single query to search across all available attributes makes it much faster to identify a customer. Search can also be used to optimize speed and accuracy of results for chat applications and chat bots who have to answer a large volume and variety of questions. This is a perfect use case for search with unpredictable user inputs. If answers to the questions can be searched across the entire knowledge base, speed and relevancy can be improved. MongoDB has retailer customers building chatbot applications for internal use cases like an IT team answering common questions, and external ones. For example, on the ecommerce homepage, a chatbot needs search functionality to be able to quickly do product lookup, customer identification, or make a suggestion. Quick and easy search implementation will add to the customer experience and reduce staff operations. Where your company could add search functionality It’s time to think beyond the ecommerce search bar. What are the search workloads within your company’s retail estate? Are there internal applications that have your frontline or back-office staff frustrated with inefficient lookups? Is the reason you’re not implementing search today the fact that it's a heavy lift to add an additional technical component to your architecture? These are the types of conversations that are driving adoption of Atlas Search across the retail industry, as businesses persevere in a tough macro-economic climate to do more with less. Adding vital functionality to applications without adding complexity is a win for the retailer, the workforce and the consumer. Want to learn about how MongoDB has integrated Search into the Atlas Developer Data Platform? Head to the Search solution page to explore more technical and in-depth resources.

March 29, 2023

New in Atlas Search: Improve Content Recommendations With “More Like This”

We’re proud to announce the release of More Like This, a key MongoDB Atlas Search feature that allows developers to easily build more relevant and engaging experiences for their end users. With the moreLikeThis operator, you can display documents that are similar to a result document. In this article, we’ll explain how it works and how you can get started using this new feature. Content recommendation done easily People who use travel booking apps, streaming services, and e-commerce websites are likely familiar with “Frequently Bought With,” “Similar Products,” or “You Might Also Enjoy” sections in their search experiences — in other words, content recommendation that guides them toward new or related products to buy, movies to stream, recipes to make, or news articles to read (among other things). Instead of building and tuning a recommendation engine to provide this functionality, developers can create engaging, browsable search experiences by defining a similarity threshold between documents to surface relevant documents. How it works Under the hood, the moreLikeThis search operator extracts the most representative terms from a reference document or documents and returns a set of similar documents. The representative terms are selected based on term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF), which is calculated by looking at a given term’s frequency in a given document multiplied by its frequency in the corpus. TF-IDF is calculated by looking at a term’s frequency multiplied by its frequency in the corpus. Atlas Search indexes term frequency by default, which means there is less up-front configuration required when compared with other search solutions. Additionally, developers have the ability to define what constitutes sufficient similarity for their use cases, with control over variables such as the number of query terms selected and the minimum and maximum document frequency thresholds. Use cases An example use case might look like this: An online bookstore wants to upsell users who have reached the checkout stage with similar books. On the checkout page, the user is served with a More Like This query result in the form of an “Other Books You Might Like” section that contains an array of book titles based on multiple fields in the document (e.g., title, publisher, genre, author). More Like This can be applied to use cases like ecommerce, content management systems, application search, or anywhere you want to share more relevant content with your users to drive deeper engagement. For more examples of how to configure More Like This, refer to our examples in the Docs . To learn how to get started with More Like This, refer to our documentation . For real-world Atlas Search implementation examples, go to our Developer Center .

August 10, 2022

5 Steps to Replacing Elasticsearch and Solr with Atlas Search

What do a global auto manufacturer, multinational media and entertainment company, and a challenger bank have in common? They have all made the switch from Elasticsearch to MongoDB Atlas Search to simplify their technology stack and ship application search faster. But what problems were they solving and how did they migrate? We have a new 5-step guide that takes you through why they switched, and how they did it. The need for application search Type almost anything into a search bar on sites like Google, Amazon, and Netflix and you are instantly presented with relevant results. Whether you make a typo or enter a partial search term, the search engine figures out what you are looking for. Results are returned conveniently sorted by relevance and are easy to navigate with features like highlighting, filters, and counts. Everyone now expects these same fast and intuitive search experiences in every application they use, whether at home or at work. However, creating these experiences is hard with the burden falling onto developers and ops teams who have to build and run the underlying systems. The pain of building application search MongoDB has always focused on accelerating and simplifying how developers build with data for any class of application. From our very earliest MongoDB releases, we saw developers needing to expose the application data stored in their database to search and information discovery. For simple use cases – where it was enough to just match text in a field – developers were able to use the basic text search operators and index built into the MongoDB database. However these lacked the much more sophisticated speed and relevance tuning features offered by dedicated search engines, typically built on top of Apache Lucene . As a result many developers ended up bolting on an external search engine such as Elasticsearch or Apache Solr to their database. Elasticsearch and Solr were (and remain) popular and proven. However as Figure 1 shows, they introduced a huge amount of complexity to the application stack, reducing developer velocity while driving up risk, complexity, and cost. Figure 1: The pain of bolting on a search engine to your database Working with the MongoDB community, our product designers and engineers ideated on ways to make building application search easier for developers – without compromising on the key features they needed. The result is MongoDB Atlas Search . What is Atlas Search and why switch to it? Atlas Search embeds a fully-managed Apache Lucene search index directly alongside the database and automatically synchronizes data between them. By integrating the database, search engine, and sync pipeline into a single, fully-managed platform you get to compress three systems into one and simplify your technology stack. Engineering teams and application owners have reported improved development velocity of 30% to 50% after adopting Atlas Search. This is because they get to: Eliminate the synchronization tax. Data is automatically and dynamically synced from the Atlas database to the Atlas Search indexes. They avoid having to stand up and manage their own sync mechanism, write custom transformation logic, or remap search indexes as their database schema evolves. They escape the 10% of engineering cycles typically lost to manually recovering sync failures, investing that time to innovate for their users instead. ( 1 ) Ship new features faster. They work with a single, unified API across both database and search operations, simplifying query development. No more context switching between multiple query languages, and with a single driver, build dependencies are streamlined so they release faster. They can test queries and preview results with interactive tools to fine-tune performance and scoring before deploying them directly into application code. Remove operational heavy-lifting. The fully-managed Atlas platform automates provisioning, replication, patching, upgrades, scaling, security, and disaster recovery while providing deep performance visibility into both database and search. By working with a single system, they avoid an exponential increase in the number of system components they need to design, test, secure, monitor, and maintain. Figure 2: Dramatic architectual simplification with integrated database, sync, and search in MongoDB Atlas 5 steps to make the switch to Atlas Search The benefits Atlas Search provides has led engineering teams across all industry sectors and geographies to make the switch from bolt-on search engines. Through the experiences gained by working with these teams, we have put together a repeatable 5-step methodology to replacing Elasticsearch and Solr. The guide steps you through how to: Qualify target workloads for Atlas Search. Migrate your indexes to Atlas Search. Migrate your queries to Atlas Search. Validate and relevance-tune your Atlas Search queries and indexes. Size and deploy your Atlas Search infrastructure. Figure 3: 5-step methodology to replacing Elasticsearch and Solr with Atlas Search The guide wraps up with examples of customers that have made the switch and provides guidance on how to get started with Atlas Search. What's next? You can get started today by downloading the 5-step guide to replacing Elasticsearch and Solr with Atlas Search . The 5-step guide is designed to help you plan and execute your migration project. MongoDB's Professional Services team is also available to you as a trusted delivery partner. We can help you through any of the steps in the methodology or throughout your entire journey to Atlas Search. If you want to dig deeper into Atlas Search, spin it up at no-cost on the Atlas Free Tier . You can follow along with reference materials and tutorials in the Atlas Search documentation using our sample data sets, or load your own data for experimentation within your own sandbox. Welcome to a world where application search is, at last, simplified! Download the 5-step Guide Now! 1. Based on interviews with engineering teams that have replaced bolt on search engines and the associated sync mechanism.

March 28, 2022

100x Faster Facets and Counts with MongoDB Atlas Search: Public Preview

Today we’ve released one of the most powerful features of Atlas Search in public preview, and ready for your evaluation: lightning fast facets and counts over large data sets. Faceted search allows users to filter and quickly navigate search results by categories and see the total number of results per category for at-a-glance statistics. With the new facet operator , facet and count operations are pushed down into Atlas Search’s embedded Lucene index and processed locally – taking advantage of 20+ years of Lucene optimizations – before returning the faceted result set back to the application. What this means is that now facet-heavy workloads such as ecommerce product catalogs, content libraries, and counts run up to 100x faster . The power of facets and counts in full-text search Faceting is a popular search and analytics capability that allows an application to group information into related categories by applying filters to query results. Users can narrow their search results by simply selecting a facet value as a filter criteria. They can intuitively explore complex data sets, providing fast and convenient navigation to quickly drill into the data that is of most interest. A common use of faceting is navigating product catalogs. With travel starting to reopen, let's take a travel site as an example. By using faceted search, the site can present vacation options by destination region, trip type (i.e. hotel, self-catering, beach, ski, city break), price band, season, and more, enabling users to quickly navigate to the category that is most relevant to them. Facets also enable fast results counting. Extending our travel site example, business analysts can use facets to quickly compare sales statistics by counting the number of trips sold by region and season. Prior to the new facet operator, the only way Atlas Search could facet and count data was to retrieve the entire result set back to MongoDB’s internal $facet aggregation pipeline stage . While that was OK for smaller data sets, it became slow when the result set exceeded tens of thousands of documents. This all changes as now operations are pushed down to Atlas Search’s embedded and optimized Lucene library in a single $search pipeline stage. From our internal testing of a collection with one million documents, the new Atlas Search faceting improves performance by 100x. How to use faceting in Atlas Search Our new Atlas Search facets tutorial will help you get started. It describes how to: Create an index with a facet definition on string, date, and numeric fields in the sample_mflix.movies collection. Then run an Atlas Search query against those fields for results grouped by values for the string field and by ranges for the date and numeric fields, including the count for each of those groups. To use Atlas Search facets, you must be running your Atlas cluster on MongoDB 4.4.11 and above or MongoDB 5.0.4 and above. These clusters must be running on the M10 tier or higher. Facets and counts currently work on non-sharded collections. Support for sharded collections is scheduled for next year. The power of Atlas Search in a unified data platform in the cloud MongoDB Atlas Search makes it easy to build fast, relevant full-text search on top of your data in the cloud. A couple of API calls or clicks in the Atlas UI, and you instantly expose your data to sophisticated search experiences that boost engagement and improve satisfaction with your applications. Your data is immediately more discoverable, usable, and valuable. By embedding the Apache Lucene library directly alongside your database, data is automatically synchronized with the search index; developers get to work with a single API; there is no separate system to run and pay for; and everything is fully-managed for you on any cloud you choose. Figure 1: Rather than bolting-on a separate search engine to your database, Atlas Search provides a fully integrated platform. Atlas Search provides the power you get with Lucene — including faceted navigation, autocomplete, fuzzy search, built-in analyzers, highlighting, custom scoring, and synonyms — combining it with the productivity you get fromMongoDB. As a result, developers can ship search applications and new features 30%+ faster. Next steps You can try out Atlas Search with the public preview of lightning-fast facets and counts today: If you are new to Atlas Search, simply spin up a cluster (M10 tier or above) and get started with our Atlas Search facets tutorial . If you are already using Atlas Search on M10 tiers and above then update your indexes to use the facet field mapping , and then start querying ! Your data remains searchable while it is being re-indexed. If you want to dig into the use cases you can serve with Atlas Search — along with users who are already taking advantage of it today — download our new Atlas Search whitepaper . Safe Harbor The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for our products remains at our sole discretion. This information is merely intended to outline our general product direction and it should not be relied on in making a purchasing decision nor is this a commitment, promise or legal obligation to deliver any material, code, or functionality.

November 9, 2021

Fine-Tune Relevance in MongoDB Atlas Search with Function Scoring and Synonyms

MongoDB Atlas Search is an embedded full-text search solution in MongoDB Atlas that gives developers a seamless and scalable experience for building fast, relevance-based application features. We announced its general availability last year at MongoDB.live 2020 and over the past year we’ve introduced many new features, including a visual index builder, search query tester, custom analyzers , and wildcard path queries . This year at MongoDB.live 2021 , we’re excited to highlight two new capabilities that help developers tune the relevance of search results. See how easy it is to get started with MongoDB Atlas Search in this demo video by Marcus Eagan, Senior Product Manager for Atlas Search. Building relevance into search results Understanding the behavior of your users is essential when thinking about search result relevance. People don’t always tell you what they want, and they sometimes use words or phrases that don’t match your content exactly. To cover these scenarios, you can use full-text search features like function scoring and synonyms. Influence search rankings with function scoring There are often multiple factors that influence how search results should be ranked. For example, let’s say you have a restaurant finder application. The explicit inputs are things like the user’s location and what they’re searching for, but what’s implied is that they likely want to see highly rated restaurants or ones with more reviews. What’s Cooking: a sample restaurant finder application using MongoDB Atlas Search Function scoring allows you to influence the order of results returned by manipulating the score of each result. In Atlas Search, that means you can use a numeric field in a document and apply a mathematical expression to it. For example, you might want to increase the score of restaurants that are sponsored or have higher star ratings. This can easily be accomplished within the same search query by simply adding the function option to the score parameter of your query. Learn more about how to use function scores in our developer tutorial . Show results for more search queries with synonyms Synonyms are often used to define terms that are semantically similar to each other to improve search results. For example, someone searching for “noodles” might want to find results for “spaghetti”, “chow mein”, or “pad thai”. Synonyms can also help with typos, especially on mobile and small keyboards. In Atlas Search, you can define collections of synonyms for a search index via the API. Synonyms can be explicit (one-way) or equivalent (two-way). Explicit synonyms are good for defining relationships between terms that are subsets of each other, like the noodle example above: “spaghetti”, “chow mein”, and “pad thai” are all explicit synonyms for “noodles”, but not each other (you don’t want results for “chow mein” in a search for “spaghetti”). Equivalent synonyms are often used for terms that have regional variations or are otherwise interchangeable both ways, like soda and pop, or Kleenex and tissues. What's next for Atlas Search Developers are increasingly turning to full-text search to make content more discoverable and relevant for application end users. With Atlas Search, we hope to not only make building full-text search easier, but also more powerful and expressive. Join our community to ask questions and find out what other developers are building with Atlas Search and let us know what you think we should build next in our feedback forums .

July 13, 2021