Sphinx VS Typesense

Sphinx - https://sphinxsearch.com

Sphinx is a search engine that can be integrated into a website to provide advanced search functionality such as full-text, Boolean, and faceted search. It is a powerful open-source search engine that can handle large amounts of data and quickly return results.

Have been using Sphinx. It does some processing around suffixes, tenses, and so on, and looks at word proximity (BM25), but is definitely limited.

Lucene is the thing you think you need. Elastic Search is a nice wrapper for it. But these are Java, so maybe you want Sphinx Search (C++) or MeiliSearch (Rust).

Using a natural language search will almost certainly be a better solution and PHP may not be the best tool for this task. Figure out how you are going to get the text out of the PDF and where you are going to put it. Look at things like sphinx and full text search in boolean mode for doing the keyword matching.

In practice though you don't do any of this, you get a library to do it for you. I've used Sphinx Search in the past for some fairly hefty (In the order of terabytes), and there's a good book covering how to get it all set up and started.

Five years ago Manticore began as a fork of an open source version of the once popular search engine Sphinx Search. We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, three C++ developers, a support engineer, a power user of Sphinx Search / backend team lead, an experienced manager, a mother of five helping us part-time, and a ton of bugs, crashes, and technical debts. So we got a shovel and other digging tools and started working to get it up to the search engine industry standards. Not that Sphinx was impossible to use, but many things were missing, and existing features weren’t quite stable or mature. And we had pushed it about as far as we could. So after 5 years and hundreds of new users, we’re ready to say that Manticore Search can be used as an alternative to Elasticsearch for both full-text search and (now) data analytics too.

Finally if you really want a full fledged solution the most popular are good old Sphinx http://sphinxsearch.com or Apache Solr https://solr.apache.org but as these take a bit of time to setup I'd make sure that's truly needed. Chances are unless your collection is the size of the Library of Congress you are probably fine with ripgrep on your own indexes as text or some R package or sqlite FTS5 extension https://www.sqlite.org/fts5.html

An old fact from 2014 December 12th was significant for Vinted: the company switched from Sphinx search engine to Elasticsearch 1.4.1. At the time of writing this post, we use Elasticsearch 7.15. Without a doubt, a lot has happened in between. This chapter will focus on Elasticsearch metrics, we will share our accumulated experiences from four generations of collecting metrics.

Disregarding props-drilling technique in favor of a more reliable and elegant solution we looked for inspiration elsewhere. Another project of ours .find was using Typesense/Algolia components, which looked a bit like black-box/magic, but at the same time provided a clean approach to build complex and highly customizable solutions.

Have you ever tried to look up something, only to realise your search engine doesn't recognise your typos? Typesense to the rescue! It's a fast, typo-tolerant search engine built for an easier browsing experience. The latest version comes with new features such as built-in conversational search, image search, voice search, analytics, and more. Dive into the release notes for the full list of changes and enhancements.

There are actually plenty of non-ES products that are way easier to integrate and tune (and get better results with less effort).

- Typesense (https://github.com/typesense/typesense)

- Algolia

- Google Programmable Search Engine (https://programmablesearchengine.google.com/about/)

Typesense - Open Source Alternative to Algolia

If you like your penny take a look at Typesense https://typesense.org/ - nothing to complain here. Especially nothing complain about pricing.

I work on Typesense [1] (historically considered an open source alternative to Algolia).

We then launched vector search in Jan 2023, and just last week we launched the ability to generate embeddings from within Typesense.

You'd just need to send JSON data, and Typesense can generate embeddings for your data using OpenAI, PaLM API, or built-in models like S-BERT, E-5, etc (running on a GPU if you prefer) [2]

You can then do a hybrid (keyword + semantic) search by just sending the search keywords to Typesense, and Typesense will automatically generate embeddings for you internally and return a ranked list of keyword results weaved with semantic results (using Rank Fusion).

You can also combine filtering, faceting, typo tolerance, etc - the things Typesense already had.

[1] https://github.com/typesense/typesense

[2] https://typesense.org/docs/0.25.0/api/vector-search.html

For something small with a minimal footprint, I'd recommend Typesense. https://github.com/typesense/typesense

I haven’t used Publish, but I’d assume you could use something like https://typesense.org/ to index and search the vault.

A cheaper option would be to use https://typesense.org. You can use DynamoDb streams to automatically load records. It has worked well for me.