[brightball]

You can go far using purely Postgres full text search. I ported a site from Solr to PG full text because of strange syncing issues and it was just as fast.

Afterwards I never really saw the point of any of the search systems other than elastic search because the streaming capabilities that it gives you.

[mistrial9]

agree, and add your own caching. Lots of pop in the web world comes from layers of well-built caching.

[sethrin]

This is probably true in many more ways than I am aware of. Do you have any other good examples or resources to suggest?