This document provides an introduction to Elasticsearch. It begins by introducing the speaker and their background. It then discusses what search is and how search engines work by using an inverted index to map tokens to documents. Elasticsearch is introduced as a search and analytics engine that is document-oriented, distributed, schema-free, and uses HTTP and JSON. It can be used for real-time search and analytics. The document discusses how Elasticsearch is based on Apache Lucene and can be run on multiple nodes in a cluster for high availability. It provides examples of using Elasticsearch for centralized logging, and discusses indexing, querying, and interacting with Elasticsearch via its RESTful API.