Elasticsearch can serve as a search engine for your website and perform a Google-like search across the entire content of your site. GitHub, Wikipedia, and many other platforms power their searches using Elasticsearch.

Elasticsearch can be leveraged to build content aggregation platforms. What is a content aggregator or a content aggregation platform? Content aggregators scrape/crawl multiple websites, index the web pages, and provide a search functionality on the underlying content. This is a powerful way to build domain-specific, aggregated platforms. 

Apache Nutch, an open source, large-scale web crawler, was created by Doug Cutting, the original creator of Apache Lucene. Apache Nutch crawls the web, parses HTML pages, stores them, and also builds indexes to make the content searchable. Apache Nutch supports indexing into Elasticsearch or Apache Solr for its search engine.

As is evident, Elasticsearch and the Elastic Stack have many practical use cases. The Elastic Stack is a platform with a complete set of tools to build end-to-end search and analytics solutions. It is a very approachable platform for developers, architects, business intelligence analysts, and system administrators. It is possible to put together an Elastic Stack solution with almost zero coding and only configuration. At the same time, Elasticsearch is very customizable, that is, developers and programmers can build powerful applications using its rich programming language support and REST API.