In the previous chapters, we explored how the persistence solution offered by Google App Engine, known as datastore, works under the hood, how we can model data around it and how we can query that data. But we did hit some limitations when it came to performing searches, because of the way datastore works internally. It is time to address those limitations now. App Engine provides us with a separate search service where we can index our data and can later perform complex queries on it.

In this chapter, we'll look at:

This is a tall order so let's get started with our discussion of that. Before we dive into details, it would be better to have some context around how searches works and some background history.