This is fun to see, and for a seriously deserving team!<p>Vespa really is an impressive platform. I've been working with search platforms for a while, starting with FAST Instream, MarkLogic, Elastic, Weaviate, and now Vespa. As others have noted, Vespa has a deep technical lineage. You can see a lot of the hard earned lessons in the design, as well as improvements in the flaws of the spiritual predecessors (FAST et. al).<p>The history alone makes the project interesting. But then, in the last couple of years (or maybe earlier), they started introducing all the fundamentals for supporting deep integration of tensors and a custom HNSW implementation. Whether accident or planning, this was a nice strategic move. They were leagues ahead, just in time for the popularization of learned embeddings.<p>Now they have the best combination of traditional lexical search, semantic search with embeddings, and the combination of the two in hybrid search. That's without even getting to all the functionality in the multi-phase ranking, hosted ML models, and document processing engine.<p>Obviously I'm biased (we use Vespa at work for enterprise search products), but I can't recommend this engine/platform enough.<p>Congrats again to the team!