Creating a search experience using React and Elasticsearch on GCP

In the age of wearables, smart devices, and apps collecting millions of data points every second, for someone to manually sift through data and generate insights is extremely tedious and not to mention very time-consuming. Technology can be used as a tool to help make this process more efficient and fast. The traditional methods of “creating reports” from data are reactive approaches and do not give user the power to “discover” patterns in a large dataset. Also, traditional techniques and relational databases are not scalable to handle the sheer amount of data. Here is a good article which discusses the shortcomings of RDMS scalability for big data.

In this article, I walk through creating a search experience front-end application using React which uses ElasticSearch to search content from public dataset of air quality measurements provided by OpenAQ in BigQuery. The front end written in React will allow users to search and explore data.

Setting up Elastic Search in Google Cloud

Go to https://console.cloud.google.com/ and create a project on Google Cloud.

On the left side of the menu, choose Elasticsearch Service. The only reason I chose this is to get some free credit to do my project work. You can create a separate account on Elasticsearch if you want to but the trial only lasts for 14 days.

A little bit about Elasticsearch Service on Google Cloud; The service offers…