Finding similar articles in realtime
Elasticsearch is the right tool to use if you don't want to code this yourself. Indeed, you need an indexing algorithm that is able to efficiently retrieve pieces of texts in a big database, and SQL isn't particularly good at it. Moreover, Elasticsearch is quite user friendly, so it won't be an overkill to actually install it and use it. You might discover in the process that finding most similar articles isn't that easy and that Elasticsearch is of a great. 

Here is the documentation for a Python client: