ElasticSearch offers an excellent alternative when you need to implement a better alternative to MySQL FULLTEXT search, with nice features such as related results, facets, “did-you-mean” and many, many options to control exactly what you need to get from it.
Unfortunately, as your data grows it also becomes harder to host on your own and keep focusing on your product rather than the operation of your search cluster, which it’s why there are several services that can take care of this.
Here’s some of them and their main differences.