By modern I mean the approach to configuring and running, and the myriad of languages used: Antiquated XML for some things, a homegrown DSL for others, JSON for

By modern I mean the approach to configuring and running, and the myriad of languages used: Antiquated XML for some things, a homegrown DSL for others, JSON for query results, then multiple languages for expressing various parts of the query -- it's pretty chaotic. Another thing that felt antiquated: The whole notion of uploading an "application". I can appreciate the benefits of controlling the lifecycle of the configuration and have Vespa distribute it to nodes. But when you start out, that "application" is just one or two files, and yet you have to create a whole directory structure for it, as opposed to just POSTing individual configs to REST endpoints like you can do with ES. The heavy-handedness of it feels very "Java". The document you linked to is a different type of exact match. I've been through this, and even posted a Github issue. Mysteriously, a Vespa developer replied that nobody had ever needed exact string matching, so nobody had bothered to implement it. Parent/child is not applicable to what I was talking about, I think. I'm not talking about hierarchical relationships. For my part, most of my work is in structured data, not text or vector-based ranking, and Vespa really doesn't seem to be designed for that. ES also has a very, very good aggregation API. Vespa's aggregation syntax is odd and seemingly much more limited.