In my journey to learn Rust I sought for a person criticize my Rust skills, so I searched for a 'good first issue' in GitHub, by writing a PR in Rust I could fullfil two dreams of mine
1. Learn Rust.
2. Having a code that I wrote run on large amount of devices across the world.<p>Eventually I ended up on MeiliSearch repo, I fixed an interesting bug, and I must say that the maintainers were super nice across all the process, a couple of months after my contribution they sent hand written letters and a bunch of stickers to all of the project contributors, one of the nicest interactions I ever had on the internet (ironically the first PR that I wrote that got accepted involved one line of CSS, which is field I'm proficient at).
I’m using it in production for <a href="https://opencoaster.com" rel="nofollow">https://opencoaster.com</a> (very wip site). It’s fast.<p>Their team is fairly responsive to bugs but I had one negative experience when trying to help them fix their instantsearch lib. They were grabbing as many pages as you had set for max pages at once and would re query it on pagination - huge waste of data transfer. They refused to see the problem so I just did a private fork just to get it working but far as I know that’s still a bug.<p>I need to upgrade the engine itself but looks like they added the ability to upgrade and not lose all the data. That was frustrating but understandable.<p>Overall I’m very impressed how stable it is
As seen previously on another post about MeiliSearch after reading an extensive comparison in [0], I'm sorry but I'm not convinced with it yet as it is extremely limited and immature.<p>The only argument here that is being made here is that it is 'written in Rust'.<p>Just use something production ready like Typesense. [0]<p>[0] <a href="https://typesense.org/typesense-vs-algolia-vs-elasticsearch-vs-meilisearch/" rel="nofollow">https://typesense.org/typesense-vs-algolia-vs-elasticsearch-...</a>
MeiliSearch also work a 4 day week which is pretty cool<p><a href="https://4dayweek.io/company/meilisearch/jobs" rel="nofollow">https://4dayweek.io/company/meilisearch/jobs</a>
If you're in the market for lightweight but fast search engines, I would recommend you take a look to typesense [1], instead; or even sonic [2], if it fits your use case. MeiliSearch does not give you anything on top of them (i.e. neither as feature complete as [1], not as fast as [2]).<p>And I personally stopped using them after a really bad experience I had with their "developers". They don't really care about you and it shows, also, they were kind of rude when I reported some bugs to them.<p>I moved to typesense and it's a whole different world, their creators truly enjoy that you're using their product; same thing with sonic, Valerian is the kind of hacker you'd want as a friend, super talented, super easy going, you could ask a completely dumb question on their GH and he takes the time to explain things to you at length. I know its open source, I know I didn't pay a dime, but for me, that kind of attitude makes it or break it. Plus, you actually get a superior product.<p>1: <a href="https://typesense.org/" rel="nofollow">https://typesense.org/</a><p>2: <a href="https://github.com/valeriansaliou/sonic" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/valeriansaliou/sonic</a>
> <i>and lives as a 35 MB binary when installed ... it's made up of 7,600 lines of Rust</i><p>Wow; how on earth can this blow up to 35 MB? For comparison: the Crossline stand-allone exe (<a href="http://software.rochus-keller.info/CrossLine_win32.zip" rel="nofollow">http://software.rochus-keller.info/CrossLine_win32.zip</a>) with built-in <a href="https://github.com/rochus-keller/Fts" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/rochus-keller/Fts</a> and Sqlite (all written in C/C++) is less than 7 MB. Where do the other ~30 MB come from?
Tangentially, has there been any fundamental algorithmic improvement in full text search since Boyer-Moore[1] and Knuth-Morris-Pratt[2]?<p>[1] <a href="https://xlinux.nist.gov/dads/HTML/boyermoore.html" rel="nofollow">https://xlinux.nist.gov/dads/HTML/boyermoore.html</a><p>[2] <a href="https://xlinux.nist.gov/dads/HTML/knuthMorrisPratt.html" rel="nofollow">https://xlinux.nist.gov/dads/HTML/knuthMorrisPratt.html</a>
MeiliSearch is minimalist, fast and easy to deploy (like few mins to get up and doing its thing). I am using it to power full text search at TinyGem.<p><a href="https://tinygem.org" rel="nofollow">https://tinygem.org</a><p>It is great to put a concept in place. For more advanced use (mainly index and search features) I was also evaluating TypeSense which didn't win me over as a product. I have not tried Algolia because of perception that it is heavier and paid from get go.
Can you really use the number of lines of code in a comparison of MeiliSearch and ElasticSearch, or Sphinx-Search?<p>Arguably I'm not the biggest fan of ElasticSearch, it's a way too complex to manage and interact with, if you just need to add search to a product. However, ElasticSearch i also much more than just a search engine. I would never use Bleve or Sphinx as a primary data store, but ElasticSearch is a perfectly good document database.
We are using it on our PoC products. It's really great and fast! it removes all the traction of doing an autocomplete search.<p><a href="https://correlate.meetglimpse.com/" rel="nofollow">https://correlate.meetglimpse.com/</a><p>If you're doing some test products and just want to have a search that is easier to setup than ES. Meilisearch is a great alternative.
A reminder about Xapian which the author did not include (it is only a library)<p><a href="https://xapian.org/" rel="nofollow">https://xapian.org/</a>
I couldn't find it from a quick search... Do you know if this tool supports non English languages (specifically greek)? Also why idea if it also supports stemming for these i.e I would like to search for σκύλος (=dog) and get documents having σκύλων (=dogs).
I had been following its development for a while, but then I moved to Typesense after evaluating this matrix:<p><a href="https://typesense.org/typesense-vs-algolia-vs-elasticsearch-vs-meilisearch/" rel="nofollow">https://typesense.org/typesense-vs-algolia-vs-elasticsearch-...</a> (yes it's hosted by Typesense)
They have another prototype engine with more advanced features and performance too.<p><a href="https://github.com/meilisearch/milli" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/meilisearch/milli</a>
I haven't tried MeiliSearch, but I spent a little bit of time this morning looking at the code. Maybe off topic, but Rust really is a nice language to read. I wanted to learn another non-Lisp language, and after a few evenings of playing with Rust, I settled on Swift for a few small side projects. I slightly regret that decision, but both languages fill the same application space for me.
This is a pretty interesting format for a blog post. I'm not sure I've really seen something like this before, but I really enjoyed this one~
After looking at various alternatives, I'm thinking of trying out <a href="https://vespa.ai/" rel="nofollow">https://vespa.ai/</a>
MeiliSearch looks fantastic! I haven't tried it but at least it is written in Rust so that should be a good reason to try it out for a project of mine.