I think "full-text indexing" is a very different problem than "search."

Full-text indexing (what ES provides) has been around for almost forever, ES just does a way better job of productizing/delivering it.

However, Google is far more than a text index. Ranking, currently is still very difficult and requires messing around with facet and weighting parameters.

I don't think so. I just went to their site and the first case study i opened was from theguardian.com. I went to theguardian.com and went to do a search. Guess who they are using to power their search function? Google.

In my opinion which means nothing, sites need to figure out how to power their own search. Using a third party isn't going to work for most. Maybe people need to focus on building custom architecture that indexes the data in a more structured way rather than cobbling systems together that ultimately hinder search efforts when its time to get the user what they want. I don't know the answer but somebody eventually will. Maybe wordpress will create a powerful search for all those wordpress sites.

Maybe I'm beating a dead horse but I feel like you could create a pretty compelling search engine using ES. I used it this summer at Goldman and it seems like it will really change the landscape... It's just so fast. I mean full-text-indexing seems to be a pretty integral part of search. Maybe it's just the first step, with the second step being a well written ranking function, but that's just my thought.

Elastic is more like a quick way to search through huge amounts of text, not a way to rank which hits are more relevant.

It lets you define your own ranking /scoring function I think