annoy VS Milvus

The focus on the top 10 in vector search is a product of wanting to prove value over keyword search. Keyword search is going to miss some conceptual matches. You can try to work around that with tokenization and complex queries with all variations but it's not easy.

Vector search isn't all that new a concept. For example, the annoy library (https://github.com/spotify/annoy) has been around since 2014. It was one of the first open source approximate nearest neighbor libraries. Recommendations have always been a good use case for vector similarity.

Recommendations are a natural extension of search and transformers models made building the vectors for natural language possible. To prove the worth of vector search over keyword search, the focus was always on showing how the top N matches include results not possible with keyword search.

In 2023, there has been a shift towards acknowledging keyword search also has value and that a combination of vector + keyword search (aka hybrid search) operates in the sweet spot. Once again this is validated through the same benchmarks which focus on the top 10.

On top of all this, there is also the reality that the vector database space is very crowded and some want to use their performance benchmarks for marketing.

Disclaimer: I am the author of txtai (https://github.com/neuml/txtai), an open source embeddings database

If you want to go larger you could still use some simple setup in conjunction with faiss, annoy or hnsw.

I then use annoy to compare them. Annoy can use different measures for distance, like cosine, euclidean and more

Yes you can do this for equality predicates if your row groups are sorted . This blog post (that I didn't write) might add more color. You can't do this for any kind of text searching. If you need to do this with file based storage I'd recommend using a vector based text search and utilize a ANN index library like Annoy.

If you need large scale (1000+ dimension, millions+ source points, >1000 queries per second) and accept imperfect results / approximate nearest neighbors, then other people have already mentioned some of the best libraries (FAISS, Annoy).

Would be possible to further speed up the process with using something like ANNOY? https://github.com/spotify/annoy

I like Faiss but I tried Spotify's annoy[1] for a recent project and was pretty impressed.

Since lots of people don't seem to understand how useful these embedding libraries are here's an example. I built a thing that indexes bouldering and climbing competition videos, then builds an embedding of the climber's body position per frame. I then can automatically match different climbers on the same problem.

It works pretty well. Since the body positions are 3D it works reasonably well across camera angles.

The biggest problem is getting the embedding right. I simplified it a lot above because I actually need to embed the problem shape itself because otherwise it matches too well: you get frames of people in identical positions but on different problems!

[1] https://github.com/spotify/annoy

If you just want quick in memory search then pynndescent is a decent option: it's easy to install, and easy to get running. Another good option is Annoy; it's just as easy to install and get running with python, but it is a little less performant if you want to do a lot of queries, or get a knn-graph quickly.

Zilliz (zilliz.com) | Hybrid/ONSITE (SF, NYC) | Full-time

I am part of the hiring team for DevRel

NYC - https://boards.greenhouse.io/zilliz/jobs/4307910005

SF - https://boards.greenhouse.io/zilliz/jobs/4317590005

Zilliz is the company behind Milvus (https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus), the most starred vector database on GitHub. Milvus is a distributed vector database that shines in 1B+ vector use cases. Examples include autonomous driving, e-commerce, and drug discovery. (and, of course, RAG)

We are also hiring for other roles that I am not personally involved in the hiring process for such as product managers, software engineers, and recruiters.

Get started with Milvus on GitHub.

Milvus: An open-source vector database designed for AI and ML applications. It excels in handling large-scale vector similarity searches, making it suitable for recommendation systems, image and video retrieval, and natural language processing tasks.

Selecting the right version of open-source Milvus is important to the success of any project leveraging vector search technology. With Milvus offering different versions of its vector database tailored to varying requirements, understanding the significance of selecting the correct version is key for achieving desired outcomes.

Milvus is an open-source vector database designed to handle large-scale similarity search and vector indexing. It supports multiple index types and offers highly efficient search capabilities, making it suitable for a wide range of AI and ML applications, including image and video recognition, natural language processing, and recommendation systems.

Zilliz is hiring! We're looking for REMOTE and/or HYBRID roles in SF

Zilliz is the company behind Milvus (https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus), the most widely adopted vector database. Vector databases are a crucial piece of any technology stack looking to take advantage of unstructured data. Most recently and notably, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). For RAG, vector databases like Milvus are used as the tool to inject customized data. In other words, vector databases make things like customized chat bots, personalized product recommendations, and more possible.

We are hiring for Developer Advocates, Senior+ Level Engineers and Product people, and Talent Acquisition. Check out all the roles here: https://zilliz.com/careers

Good on them, I know the crustaceans are out here happy about this raise for a Rust based Vector DB!

(now I'm gonna plug what I work on)

If you're interested in a more scalable vector database written in Go, check out Milvus (https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus)

But before we do, I do want to say that 🤩 all these lovely Open-Source projects would love a little 🎉💕 love by getting a GitHub star ⭐ for their efforts. Including Open Source Milvus 🥰

1. Milvus by Zilliz | Github