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InfluxDB
Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
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MeiliSearch
A lightning-fast search API that fits effortlessly into your apps, websites, and workflow
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Typesense
Open Source alternative to Algolia + Pinecone and an Easier-to-Use alternative to ElasticSearch ⚡ 🔍 ✨ Fast, typo tolerant, in-memory fuzzy Search Engine for building delightful search experiences
Good point about MySQL/MariaDB. I think this is different though because search engines are at a big pivot point to include approximate-nearest-neighbor dense vector search (which has forever been sparse vector search for Lucene based platforms).
Specifically, this feature https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/issues/42326#issuec... will be a big change for Elasticsearch. OpenSearch might try to mimic the API, but implementation details here will matter a lot, since this type of search is really picky when it comes to performance/recall balance. OpenDistro has already been working on their own version: https://opendistro.github.io/for-elasticsearch/features/knn.... ...so will they switch their API? Perhaps - but the results are going to be very different.
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
> it appears that right now Elastic is on its heals while Amazon is driving forward
Perhaps - what are the commit/accepted contribution rates for the two projects like at the moment? (I'm not saying that's a perfect metric, but it could provide some information)
> Which open-source search engines do you think are competitive?
MeiliSearch[1] is an impressive-looking candidate. Perhaps two of the stronger innovations of Elasticsearch were horizontal scalability and the ability to pass documents to it over-the-network (basically, the ability to curl a JSON document and instantly have it be searchable -- and I'll admit/credit that Solr may have gotten there first with XML documents). Those two features make it easy to get started, and easy to scale up if needed (a common architect's concern).
[1] - https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliSearch
> Which open-source search engines do you think are competitive?
I work on an open source search engine called Typesense: https://typesense.org/
I'm biased, but I'd like to think that when it comes to site/app search, Typesense is quite competitive to Elasticsearch. Of course, ES has tons of features and configuration options, which is a blessing and a curse in terms of complexity and learning curve, so I wouldn't want to claim feature parity. But in terms of getting a good out-of-the-box search solution that works well for most use-cases and is easy to deploy and scale, I'm hoping for Typesense to be that go to.
I recently put this comparison matrix together: https://typesense.org/typesense-vs-algolia-vs-elasticsearch-...