Elasticsearch / Enhanced Search for smaller boards - useful?

I'm using Xenforo for my company's internal board which is expanding to include external users as well. That said, it will not be a large board for a long long time - I'm guessing under 1000 hits a day, if that. The cost for enhanced search is really not that big of a deal to add greater search capability, control, or speedier results.

However, is there any benefit for smaller boards using Elasticsearch over the fulltext MySQL capability?
 
Good question, I'm curious also, what exactly does it do and why better?

What additional features are there ?

As with many other things developers run with the assumption forum admins and biz folk know why we need it already, and make a poor case for selling it.
 
I think it's clear it's more performant for larger sites than MySQL fulltext search. Highly customizable, purpose-built, memory-oriented (if you let it be), so it's great for large boards - I got that message loud and clear. What I'm wondering is if it's also valuable for smaller boards - or if the value is purely performance for a large data set.
 
How big is a big forum to benefit from the Enhanced Search? I've got around half a million posts, getting improvement in search would be great - would this qualify?
 
I currently use it on my largest board - but plan to slowly add it to the smaller ones as funds allow; specifically because of the stemming and no min. word lenght (which I've manually set to 3 in MySQL anyway).

If you can easily afford it, have the server resources to run it, and like the idea of the additional features - then there's no real reason why you shouldn't use it for a board of any size. :D
 
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