# Search and indexing

Using SQL queries with joins to retrieve the data wanted for a search result can be expensive and cumbersome to customize. Instead, Ucommerce utilizes de-normalized data in a data store optimized for indexing, e.g. ElasticSearch, to deliver the search results fast. This increases performance on the website. It also makes it easy to customise what data you want to serve to your customers using custom [index definitions](/readme/search-and-indexing/indexing/index-definitions.md) and [adorners](/readme/search-and-indexing/indexing/custom-data.md) instead of SQL queries.

The following articles contain detailed information on how to access and use various features of Ucommerce's search API. They cover the following topics:

* [Indexing](/readme/search-and-indexing/indexing.md) - Get data into the index
* [Searching](/readme/search-and-indexing/searching.md) - Get data from the index


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