Search is all about data: Ash Kulkarni, Elastic CEO

Any search function, whether it be looking up a movie on a streaming platform, ordering an Uber or trying to book a hotel is backed by data. Ash Kulkarni, CEO at search platform Elastic spoke to Digital Nation Australia on how the search function is powered by data.

Kulkarni said some of the more complex types of data that organisations create is unstructured data.

“When you think about the types of unstructured data, it's everything from textual documents, information about geographical locations, the machine data that applications and infrastructure generates, all of it tends to be unstructured, it's freeform.

“That type of data is growing faster than just about anything else in any organisation and that data has a tremendous amount of value,” he said.

However, getting insights from that data is a very hard problem, Kulkarni explained.

“We have organisations that when they are policing and looking for how do they investigate criminal cases that they might be investigating, they often need to pull in information, all kinds and all sources of information about individuals, not just from their jurisdiction, but from other jurisdictions from Interpol.

“All of that data comes in very different forms, trying to pull all of that together, analyse it and understand what's the value related to the particular case. That's a difficult, complicated problem.”

He used some examples of Elastic customers and how they harness the power of data.

Kulkarni said, “Every time you hail an Uber ride, you are using Elastic under the covers because Uber uses elastic to figure out based on your geographical location, what are the cars that are closest to where you are, and all of that searching is done on Elastic.

“If you're booking something on Booking.com, that's another place where you are using Elastic because they are using Elastic to surface the right relevant results based on your particular queries.”

Search functions are also crucial for detecting unusual behaviours or bad actors, Kulkarni explained.

“You're looking for behavioural patterns, somebody's extracted data from some application, they might have the access rights to do that. But is it reasonable for that person to be doing it at that time, from that particular IP address?

“These are the kinds of behavioural detection patterns that matter when it comes to security to be able to understand what is just normal activity and what is that needle in the haystack that's giving you a sense that something bad is happening. Then how do you go about stopping it?”