We are proud and thrilled to present our open-source search engine. After one year of hard work, we are finally able to make our first official beta release.
We want to contribute to the open-source community by offering an ultra-relevant & instant search engine to improve the search experience in every application.
Meilisearch is the first open-source instant search engine. Instant means that our search engine is so fast to answer that you have the search-as-you-type experience - results are appearing and reordering on each keystroke.
We differ from other open-source search engines in many ways.Compared to Elastic Search (and other Lucene-based engines), we specialize in end-user search, and Meilisearch works out-of-the-box to that end. Compared to your database search engine, we are more relevant and way faster. We have typo-tolerance, and it works ;)
Motivations
We built Meilisearch with the end-users in mind, to reduce the friction between the user and the machine when using your app, browsing your website.
You should not be Amazon or Google to have a good search engine.
It seems unfair to us that today, only the biggest companies could afford the luxury of a decent search engine. From the biggest corporations to your Sunday side-project, you should have a go-to search engine that does not cost you an arm and a leg. You should not need the financial means of Google or Amazon to afford that.
Team
At the start, we were three developers. And because a developer knows how to recognize another good developer, we hired two other developers. Today, we are a team of five working on the engine, SDK's, front-end libraries, documentation, articles, and social media.
How did we survive at 5 in Paris for one year, you may ask. Well! We participated in a Hackaton about search organized by Louis Vuitton. At that time, we were already working on our search engine, and it seemed to be a call of destiny. We finished first!
Our winning price was three Louis Vuitton bags đź‘ś, and then, as a little bonus, we signed a contract with them to develop our product and run it in production on their servers.
What's coming next
We will continue to work on the search engine to make it faster and more relevant than ever and adding features such as geolocation or trendiness. We will work on different APIs wrapper and front-end libraries to make Meilisearch more and more accessible. In a few months, we may even offer our search engine as a service to free you from the hassle of maintaining your infrastructure.
If our story inspired you, please give a try to our search engine. You can follow the quick start and read more about how it works in the documentation. If you want to support us, you can star the project on Github.
