The regular Mahara search is limited to finding users and in certain places titles, descriptions and tags of pages or collections. However, Mahara can be extended to use allow for fulltext search capabilities. The Mahara core project team chose to use `Elasticsearch <http://www.elasticsearch.org/>`_. This is a powerful and extensible fulltext search engine. It does require a Java server, e.g. Tomcat, to run and thus may not be available for small instances of Mahara.
.. note::
Currently, the plugin can only be used for Mahara instances running on a PostgreSQL database. Work is in progress to extend the support for MySQL for Mahara 1.9.
If you are upgrading from a version of Mahara prior to Mahara 17.10 and you already had Elasticsearch in use, please take a look at the `upgrade instructions <https://git.mahara.org/mahara/mahara/blob/17.10_STABLE/htdocs/search/elasticsearch/upgrade_elasticsearch.readme>`_.
