Simple Search with Laravel and ElasticSearch

I was recently asked to make a search engine for a client's website. Normally I would go down the MySQL fulltext search route but I was feeling rather adventurous at the time. I had no experience with ElasticSearch, Apache Solr or any other search system prior to this so I decided to pick ElasticSearch and dive in head first. This tutorial is a result of some of the things I picked up while learning it. I aim to show you how to set up the Elasticquent Laravel package and some basic ways to fine tune your search engine.