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Ask HN: Best Elasticsearch alternative for in-app search

by warthog on 4/19/24, 10:30 PM with 1 comments

It has been sometime since I set up Elasticsearch inside my app. When I did, it was very much painful. Modern UX is to set up a CMD + K search inside the app that can access information very fast. I see that there are alternatives that came to market. Wondering your experiences as to which one to use now. My criteria is

1) Developer experience 2) Speed 3) Accuracy

Here are the alternatives I saw: - Meilisearch - Typesense - Vespa - Manticore - more...

Looking for opinionated views

  • by tpayet on 4/20/24, 12:33 PM

    Hi! I am from the Meilisearch team :) Meilisearch has been designed from the ground up for end-user search. We target to answer results in less than 50ms to give the impression of instantaneity, which is what you are looking for when building cmd + k search

    Meilisearch is one of the most recent search engines amongst those you cited, which makes for the best developer experience both for deployment/hosting & for development. You can find integrations with the most popular frameworks & languages https://www.meilisearch.com/docs/learn/what_is_meilisearch/s... which allows you to get up to speed in few minutes.

    And for relevancy/accuracy, Meilisearch offers full-text search with typo tolerance, synonyms, etc and the latest releases introduced semantic search & hybrid search. This is an API we are very proud of because it gives you a state-of-the-art search with the best DX out there.

    Typesense might be a good alternative because it can be more performant for some use cases, but the DX is less smooth, I'd say.

    Vespa might be relevant if you are looking for a very specific recommendation system. Still, now that Meilisearch offers semantic search & hybrid search I am not sure today in which context Vespa might be more relevant

    I don't know much about Manticore unfortunately.

    Let me know if you have any questions about it, but I'd encourage you to spend 10 minutes to see by yourself what's possible or not and join the community on Discord if you have any questions https://discord.meilisearch.com