now VS go-sstables

💡In this post we’re just building out a backend, and not touching on a frontend. To build your own low-code backend+frontend neural search solution, check out Jina NOW.

Check out Jina NOW for an end-to-end text-to-image search

try it out for yourself now: https://examples.jina.ai/now/. Or if you'd prefer to go through the repo and see the magic behind the scenes: https://github.com/jina-ai/now

Here's the link to try it out for yourself: https://now.jina.ai

Github Repo

And here's the open-source code for developer friends here in the community - https://github.com/jina-ai/now

I've never worked on a project that encompasses as many computer science algorithms as a search engine. There are a lot of topics you can lookup in "Information Storage and Retrieval":

- Tries (patricia, radix, etc...)

- Trees (b-trees, b+trees, merkle trees, log-structured merge-tree, etc..)

- Consensus (raft, paxos, etc..)

- Block storage (disk block size optimizations, mmap files, delta storage, etc..)

- Probabilistic filters (hyperloloog, bloom filters, etc...)

- Binary Search (sstables, sorted inverted indexes, roaring bitmaps)

- Ranking (pagerank, tf/idf, bm25, etc...)

- NLP (stemming, POS tagging, subject identification, sentiment analysis etc...)

- HTML (document parsing/lexing)

- Images (exif extraction, removal, resizing / proxying, etc...)

- Queues (SQS, NATS, Apollo, etc...)

- Clustering (k-means, density, hierarchical, gaussian distributions, etc...)

- Rate limiting (leaky bucket, windowed, etc...)

- Compression

- Applied linear algebra

- Text processing (unicode-normalization, slugify, sanitation, lossless and lossy hashing like metaphone and document fingerprinting)

- etc...

I'm sure there is plenty more I've missed. There are lots of generic structures involved like hashes, linked-lists, skip-lists, heaps and priority queues and this is just to get 2000's level basic tech.

- https://github.com/quickwit-oss/tantivy

- https://github.com/valeriansaliou/sonic

- https://github.com/mosuka/phalanx

- https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliSearch

- https://github.com/blevesearch/bleve

- https://github.com/thomasjungblut/go-sstables

A lot of people new to this space mistakenly think you can just throw elastic search or postgres fulltext search in front of terabytes of records and have something decent. The problem is that search with good rankings often requires custom storage so calculations can be sharded among multiple nodes and you can do layered ranking without passing huge blobs of results between systems.

I highly recommend people comfortable with Go checkout the building blocks at https://github.com/thomasjungblut/go-sstables

This codebase shows how SSTables, WAL, memtables, skiplists, segment files, and plenty of other storage engine components work in a digestible way. Includes a demo database showing how it all comes together.