That's because that page explains how to turn the mode on and off, how to fine-tune it (e.g. different date formats) and how to index formats other than JSON. E

That's because that page explains how to turn the mode on and off, how to fine-tune it (e.g. different date formats) and how to index formats other than JSON. Elasticsearch does not support a good chunk of this, so no need to document. If you want a more streamlined version, you can check the example instead: https://github.com/apache/lucene-solr/blob/master/solr/example/films/README.txt https://github.com/apache/lucene-solr/blob/master/solr/examp... And even then, it will already discuss the problem with auto-guessing the content types, something that Elasticsearch mentions only later. Solr is just more upfront and explicit about the issues. Still, you do have a point, Solr documentation tries to be comprehensive rather than ease-of-use oriented. That sometimes obscures the easy things.