I have a few apps that I host with a cloud provider (scalingo.com) and initially I can cover the costs. If there’s a lot of traffic because it proves to be helpful there are a few groups I could ask to help with some funding.

For now I’m building a custom index with mongoDB - if anyone is familiar with building ES queries, would be keen to chat about how that might be better.

I'll post a link here later today.

A lucene based solution would probably scale better and would allow you to implement more complex behavior. You get analyzers, stopword filters, synonyms etc. out of the box, and you can express things like "virus within 5 words of lung" or "covid or virus but covid is way more important". I believe given the rather small dataset and the fact that you won't even expose more complex queries on your interface, the main benefits are the analyzers and various filters you can use.

If you are already doing stemming, stopword filtering and maybe synonyms you're probably fine.

(My email is in my profile if you want to discuss this in further detail)

Lucene does sound good, but I don't have any experience with it so I can't get anything happening quickly. But very happy to have help if you can?

The url is - http://covid19-research.osc-fr1.scalingo.io/

CEO at Scalingo here. Scalingo may help you cover the cost cf our latest announcement https://twitter.com/ScalingoHQ/status/1240282733659774979 Contact the support for more details!

Thanks Yann, much appreciated!