lucene VS resin

First, a review of the landscape. As said in the introduction, there aren't a ton of good options. Apache Lucene is by far the best traditional search index from a speed, performance and functionality standpoint. It's the base for Elasticsearch/OpenSearch and many other projects. But it requires Java.

https://github.com/apache/lucene/issues/10047

2. The Panama Vector API allows CPU's that support it to accelerate vector operations: https://openjdk.org/jeps/438

So this allows fast ANN on Lucene for semantic search!

How did people do this before Lucene supported it? Only through entirely different tools?

Are they forking Lucene or somehow getting the Lucene devs to increase that limit? Because this PR has been open for over a year now: https://github.com/apache/lucene/issues/11507

Lucene's adaptation of Roaring uses the complement idea on a block-wise basis:

https://github.com/apache/lucene/blob/84cae4f27cfd3feb3bb42d...

Like someone said, it's in locations as specified in the path.data. Depending on sharing and replication, it could be on more than one host. Elastic uses Apache Lucene to store documents, since it's open source, that rabbit hole will welcome research :-)

It is pretty clear to me that Elastic is planning to build their ANN features differently than OpenDistro's k-NN implementation, or other plugins modules that extend Easticsearch in similar ways. They now will build on the Apache Lucene capabilities that were collaboratively built "upstream" by a number of individuals, some that work for Amazon and some that work for Elastic.

From the linked issue, it seemed that they were originally planning to develop this as a proprietary feature of Elasticsearch, without contributing the functionality to Apache Lucene, but then changed direction when the Apache Lucene developers (some of which are currently employed to do such work by Amazon) started to build its approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) vector search capabilities. [1]

It's great to see folks that work for Elastic collaborating and building on what is in Apache Lucene to extend the utility of ANN with Hierarchical Navigable Small World Graphs (HNSW) [2]! From this, I think it should be possible to implement an Open Source version of the functionality with a compatible API, if that is something that OpenSearch users seek.

[1] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-9004

[2] https://github.com/apache/lucene/pull/250

I've built a search engine. It has its own query language, data structures and binary file formats, it's MIT licensed and it has around 60 forks. Nobody uses it though, even though it has been around for some years but it was just until recently that I managed to solve the very last of the most crucial of bugs, so I don't find that surprising at all.

It works well now, though, for a Wikipedia sized text based corpus, even though it's still in beta and contains code that can still be optimized. However, before I want to go any further with the project, I'd like to see if I can sell it, the copyright to my code, that is. Because maybe I want to be in the business of creating smart code, then sell it, then move on to the next thing? And maybe some company would like to have a search engine in their software portfolio? Suppose we meet, have a drink, see what happens.

Do I have the rights to sell it, though?

I'm the author of 99.999% of the commits.

https://github.com/kreeben/resin