In order to encourage more community involvement with Steemit.com development, I have worked with the Steemit development team and @pharesim (one of the top 19 witnesses) to organize a bounty for adding an "Advanced Search" feature to Steemit.com. This bounty is to develop the back-end search engine (using ElasticSearch) that will support the addition of this feature to the website.

The deliverable for this bounty is a daemon service, which will continuously monitor the blockchain and keep an ElasticSearch database up-to-date.

Technical Requirements:

1. Import all blocks from steemd (except the most recent N blocks) into ElasticSearch using nodejs.
2. The block import should be a single command that will start from scratch or catch up if restarted.
3. Any third party libraries will need to be approved in advance by the official Steemit development team.
4. The application should match the coding style of Steemit.com as much as possible.
5. The service must be compatible with the Steemit.com environment, and be able to be installed on the Steemit.com servers.
6. The updates to the ElasticSearch database should be done in a reasonably efficient manner.
7. It should be resilient and easy to deploy.

The ElasticSearch database must support the following queries:

• Full-text search queries of post text
• Query by author
• Query by tag
• Query by date/time range that the post was created

These are not 'required' but should be supported if possible:

• Query by number of upvotes (range)
• Query by number of comments (range)
• Query by the number of followers an author has (range)
• Query by the reputation of the author (range)
• Query by pending payout amount (range)
• Custom sort orders (newest vs. oldest, relevance, highest payout vs. lowest payout, etc.)
• The ability to query the ElasticSearch database for all the data elements needed to render a "preview post" - Title, thumbnail, preview text, author name, author reputation, category, post time, etc.
• If payouts are to be indexed, that part of the data does not necessarily need to be kept up-to-date in real-time. The active 24 hour posts could be re-indexed every 15-30 minutes, and the 30 day posts could be re-indexed every 1-2 hours.

Bounty Requirements:

• In order to receive the bounty, the developer must implement the ElasticSearch database described above, which meets all of the requirements listed in this post.
• The application must be accepted by the official Steemit, Inc. development team and pass all internal tests and code reviews.
• The bounty must be claimed by January 31, 2017. If the application is not completed by this time, the bounty will be voided. An extension may be provided if reasonable progress can be demonstrated, although this must be discussed with me and approved by me ahead of time if it is needed.

Technicalities:

• The bounty payment will be $300 SBD + the STEEM/SBD portion of the author payout from this post.
• After the payment period for this post closes, I will be exchanging any STEEM from the payout to SBD, using the internal exchange. I will make note of the final bounty amount in the comments after the exchange is complete.
• If any other users in the community add to the bounty, I cannot guarantee that part of the payment unless they provide me with the SBD to hold and distribute as part of the official bounty reward.
• It is the developer's responsibility to ensure that the code meets all of the Steemit dev team's requirements, and make whatever changes are necessary in order for the application to be accepted and published on the live site. I have no control over what the Steemit development team will accept.
• It is the developer's responsibility to ensure that all the requirements in this post are met.
• If you are unsure about anything, please ask.

Final Suggestions:

• It is highly recommended that if you are planning to pursue this bounty, you let me know in advance.
• If you have any questions, you can reply to this post or contact me in Steemit.chat.
• You should seek reviews from the Steemit dev team frequently throughout the process.

If anyone would like to add to the bounty, please indicate so in the comments below. I can hold and distribute any bounty funds as part of the official award, or provide you with a notification if/when the bounty is satisfied. Any funds sent to me would be returned if the bounty is not met.

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A huge thank you to @pharesim for contributing the $300 SBD to make this bounty possible! Also thank you to the Steemit developers who took the time to help me put all this together so that we can make this bounty a success!

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Remember to vote for witnesses here:
https://steemit.com/~witnesses