Elasticsearch is a popular open-source search engine used for adding full-text search capabilities in projects due to its real-time speeds and robust API. However, it can be complicated at first, but with the right configuration, it can provide flexible text search results. A standard analyzer may not be enough if you want better and more flexible search results, as seen in the example where a custom analyzer was created to achieve case-insensitive search using incomplete words of 3-8 characters in length. The custom analyzer uses an edge-ngram tokenizer, which breaks up tokens based on length, and a lowercase token filter to make search case insensitive. With this configuration, Elasticsearch provides great custom search results, and the next step will be exploring aggregations.