Can you really use the number of lines of code in a comparison of MeiliSearch and ElasticSearch, or Sphinx-Search?
Arguably I'm not the biggest fan of ElasticSearch, it's a way too complex to manage and interact with, if you just need to add search to a product. However, ElasticSearch i also much more than just a search engine. I would never use Bleve or Sphinx as a primary data store, but ElasticSearch is a perfectly good document database.
I would think it’s just a rough indicator of complexity. Elasticsearch has a lot of features, probably many more than MeiliSearch. This can be good or bad, depending on what you’re looking for.
If comparing the same language, maybe. But the amount of boilerplate when comparing a C/C++ to rust to Java, it doesn’t work. Even then, some teams might prefer to use more dependencies and others less.
In my experience, it would be possible to use it as a document database, and I suppose it would be good in the interest of reducing duplication issues if you were initially storing the documents in a traditional DBMS or file system.
However, that's not really what it was made for. Especially early on when you're planning out your schema and such, dropping and re-indexing your documents is a really simple task. If the index itself is your primary document store, what are you indexing from? Would you have a DBMS or file system as your secondary store in that case? That just seems so awkward and backwards.
Keep the square pegs in the square holes and use Elastic (and the alternatives discussed in this thread) as a search index.
Arguably I'm not the biggest fan of ElasticSearch, it's a way too complex to manage and interact with, if you just need to add search to a product. However, ElasticSearch i also much more than just a search engine. I would never use Bleve or Sphinx as a primary data store, but ElasticSearch is a perfectly good document database.