Case Study: Rightmove achieves scalable, real-time geo search and smarter property alerts with Elastic

Elasticsearch and Rightmove Mapping Out Your New Home With Search

Rightmove is the UK’s largest property portal (about 1.2M listings and 55M visitors a month) that connects estate and letting agents with buyers and renters. In 2014 its monolithic proprietary search could only index offline, required nightly re-indexing, didn’t scale when more nodes were added, and lacked built-in geo capabilities—forcing time-consuming custom solutions and limiting site features.

Under “Project Odin” Rightmove moved to Elasticsearch for faster indexing, easier scaling, and native geo and percolator features. Elasticsearch powers geo distance, polygon/shape and bounding-box searches that enable Draw-a-Search, “Where Can I Live?”, sold-price analysis and automated alerts (3.5M saved searches, ~1B percolator queries), and makes 7.3B daily logs (≈17 TB/2 weeks) queryable. The result: real-time, scalable search, richer mapping and alerting features, and faster continuous deployments via microservices.

Rightmove