How can ElasticSearch be used to implement social search?

Question

I’m trying to create a business search with social features using ElasticSearch. I have a business directory, and users can interact with those businesses in different ways: b

Answer 1

Just spitballing here but I think I'd want to Use a graph database like Neo4J where it would be trivial to do such a query as "businesses that my friends have checked into" and query both that database and elasticsearch at the same time and return results from your graph database first. Or you could just get the results of that graph query and match the results in elasticsearch (match the ids) then apply a query time boost to the elastic search results so that they floated to the top of the returned results.