I was not satisfied with the simple search plugin that came with octopress (although it is suitable for many blogs), so I started looking for a simple search solution without any branding and with all the features I wanted. I came across Solr, but it was oversized for my concerns. I did not want to create a complex scheme and push the documents with brackground jobs or something similar. This is where elasticsearch came into play. The very dynamic nature fitted very well and the easy to use http interface was exactly what I needed.
I've hacked a simple indexer plugin and a simple javascript file to query the index and display the results in a badly styled overlay (I'm no CSS guy at all).
Here comes the plugin, which is a simple jekyll generator. I does not check for anything, but if you are able to blog with octopress you should be able to cope with the sources and customize them to fit your needs. You'll need to add those two config entries for your index url (which should be protected by http-basic auth) and your index name.
The javascript is also dead simple. You'll need a jsonp request if your elasticsearch server is hosted on another domain or port (which is very likely). The script is nothing crazy. Most of the code is rather bad, using jQuery selectors directly and not using any scope related stuff. The code might work better as a jQuery plugin or something more reusable. Anyway, it works for me as a first step. Feel free to enhance it and drop me a line over twitter so I can link to your solution.
