Is there a self-contained alternative to ElasticSearch specifically? If there was one written in Go or otherwise statically linkable that would be great from a deployment standpoint. I could deal with somewhat worse performance in exchange for that.
Lucene & Hadoop meant a big push for the Java eco-system, it's like a lock-in. Native C++ libraries and other free text search implementations have a smaller community and are usually less known. With Go, C++11 and Rust the future looks bright but it will take some time to catch up.
I have. The problem is picking one that is mature enough and will be supported for years as you can expect ElasticSearch to be, which is what I meant by "an alternative".
I agree with you about the future looking bright but I meant something you could use right now.
It's hard to say, for Go there is e.g. bleve FTS and there are ports of Java Lucene to Go (e.g. https://github.com/balzaczyy/golucene). Such ports are either semi-automatic or automatic, only automatic ports. It's hard for Lucene ports to keep up, as Lucene is moving fast and most ports stalled.
One could also use a service oriented architecture and use e.g. ElasticSearch Rest API or C++ based Sphinx Search, both need litttle configuration and no custom code.
