MeiliSearch
Modern and responsive search
Advanced content search for apps and websites has become an increasingly protected craft. When owners of big content repositories need search at scale, they have to choose between hiring expensive search specialists or outsourcing search in its entirety. Search doesn’t need to be this complicated. It should be simple enough to be self-hosted with the developers you already have, and it should be understandable & open enough that you can resort to a managed cloud without fear of lock-in.
MeiliSearch is blazing fast and very light on resources. It packs advanced search capabilities like search-as-you-type, relevancy , typo-tolerance, synonyms and filters, all set up and configured in minutes. Our primary path to widespread adoption is integration with other developer ecosystems. Every new language, framework, platform or application that’s supported brings in a new audience of developers that wouldn’t otherwise know we even exist.
- The project's own website: https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch
Why does this actually matter to end users?
Search and discovery is one of the most important and essential use cases of the internet and information society in general. When you are in school and need to give a presentation, when you are looking for a job, trying to promote your business or finding relevant commercial or public services you need, most of the time you will turn to a search bar on- and offline to find answers. Searching information is crucial for users, but they actually have little control over how it precisely works. Search engines set the terms for what results you see, how your website can be discovered and what information is logged about your searches. What terms are set remains obscure for users and they can only follow the rules laid out for them, instead of deciding on their own what, where and how to find the information they are looking for.
What if instead of search and discovery as a closed box, we use transparent technology that like building blocks, we can put together to make tools that serve us best? MeiliSearch is such a customizable building block, and a powerful one too: as a so-called instant search engine users can search-as-they-type, speeding through indexes and data in milliseconds, all the while being simple and accessible to use for anyone who wants to make their own search solution. This project aims to push uptake of this promising technology in as many programming languages, platforms (think Android) and mainstream applications like WordPress and Drupal as possible, making a lot of search tools much faster with reliable, transparent technology.
This project was funded through the NGI0 Discovery Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No 825322.
