join the nosql movement elasticsearchthe open source search engine/nosql database to tackle the problem at handdiagnosing diseasethe nosql database you'll use is elasticsearch like mongodbelasticsearch is document store but unlike mongodbelasticsearch is search engine whereas mongodb is great at performing complex calculations and mapreduce jobselasticsearch' main purpose is fulltext search elasticsearch will do basic calculations on indexed numerical data such as summingcountsmedianmeanstandard deviationand so onbut in essence it remains search engine elasticsearch is built on top of apache lucenethe apache search engine created in lucene is notoriously hard to handle and is more building block for more user-friendly applications than an end-to-end solution in itself but lucene is an enormously powerful search engineand apache solr followed in opening for public use in solr (an open sourceenterprise search platformis built on top of apache lucene and is at this moment still the most versatile and popular open source search engine solr is great platform and worth investigating if you get involved in project requiring search engine in elasticsearch emergedquickly gaining in popularity although solr can still be difficult to set up and configureeven for small projectselasticsearch couldn' be easier solr still has an advantage in the number of possible plugins expanding its core functionalitybut elasticsearch is quickly catching up and today its capabilities are of comparable quality step setting the research goal can you diagnose disease by the end of this using nothing but your own home computer and the free software and data out thereknowing what you want to do and how to do it is the first step in the data science processas shown in figure data science process primary goaldisease search define research goal setting the research goal figure secondary goaldisease profiling create project charter step in the data science processsetting the research goal your primary goal is to set up disease search engine that would help general practitioners in diagnosing diseases your secondary goal is to profile diseasewhat keywords distinguish it from other diseasesthis secondary goal is useful for educational purposes or as input to more advanced uses such as detecting spreading epidemics by tapping into social media with your research goal and plan of action definedlet' move on to the data retrieval step