How to do FTS within Google Cloud Platform

Question

Does Google Cloud Platform have a product to do full-text search via an API with non-web data (such as json or xml documents)? This may seem like a pretty silly question, but the only options I have come across are:

• Search inside of Google App Engine (only available for python2, not python3) -- https://cloud.google.com/appengine/training/fts_intro/.
• Related to web search only: https://developers.google.com/custom-search/docs/tutorial/introduction
• Using a managed Elasticsearch: https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/google/elasticsearch.
• Cloud firestore explicitly states it doesn't offer that and suggests using Aloglia (and gives details on integrating): https://cloud.google.com/firestore/docs/solutions/search

Is there something I'm missing? I'm basically looking to index and search about a million documents in a sort of free-form type of search. Is this offered as a product from Google outside of App Engine? If so, how can I access it?

Answer 1

You have pretty much covered it there. There is currently no specific Google service for full-text search. As you mentioned, App Engine Search API is available for Python 2.7, which will stop being maintained after January 2020, and not Python 3.

There is one more option you could consider, which is using Lucene foe GAE. I found this blog where several possibilities are studied, perhaps could be an interesting reading for you.

To sum up, I would recommend ElasticSearch or Aloglia, but for the latter you need a Firebase project.