If you're in the market for lightweight but fast search engines, I would recommend you take a look to typesense [1], instead; or even sonic [2], if it fits your use case. MeiliSearch does not give you anything on top of them (i.e. neither as feature complete as [1], not as fast as [2]).
And I personally stopped using them after a really bad experience I had with their "developers". They don't really care about you and it shows, also, they were kind of rude when I reported some bugs to them.
I moved to typesense and it's a whole different world, their creators truly enjoy that you're using their product; same thing with sonic, Valerian is the kind of hacker you'd want as a friend, super talented, super easy going, you could ask a completely dumb question on their GH and he takes the time to explain things to you at length. I know its open source, I know I didn't pay a dime, but for me, that kind of attitude makes it or break it. Plus, you actually get a superior product.
Thank you for your kind words. Made my day. Typesense is 100% bootstrapped, and a labor of love[0]. We will certainly do our best to keep making it better.
One of my favorite parts of working on Typesense is the opportunity to interact with so many developers from around the world, getting to know about the product and domain they are working on, their tech stacks and how Typesense fits into their world. I find these interactions helpful in enriching my own world view and helps me build valuable context as we design new features. I’ve sometimes been blown away by how the foundational construct of a fast and distributed search engine, is being used for use cases I could not have even imagined!
We mainly haven’t invested time in this because we’ve heard that some folks were able to get the Linux binary working on Windows using WSL. Does that work?
Hello, as CEO of MeiliSearch, I'm really sorry from the whole team if we did not satisfy you when solving one of your bugs. I don't know which bug exactly you are referring to, but in any case, we try to answer our users and contributors with the maximum of transparency and love.
Moreover, we are certainly, on some features, maybe a little bit late. Delay that we will more than compensate before the end of the year. Our priority until now has been to offer a robust search engine accessible to all. For us, the developer experience is really important, whether it is in the use of the API or in the communication with the community.
We will continue to try to do our best for the community. If you want to help us to improve, I would be happy to take your feedback.
You chose to respond with kindness and humility here when you could've been really hostile and defensive. Really nice to see. You've made me like MeiliSearch even more!
All CEOs are contrite when they respond to being publicly shamed on Hacker News. It’s somewhat of a Hacker News trope at this point. It’s amusing, but it doesn’t mean anything.
I’ve commented on both Stripe and DigitalOcean’s terrible support, under different accounts, and had some XO give the “we’re so sorry, email me directly and I’ll personally look into it, our customers are really important to us” tripe.
I've never used or looked at Typesense (I've been perfectly happy as a Meilisearch user), but your characterisation of interacting with Meilisearch is so alien it makes me wonder if we've been looking at the same project.
Across the assortment of Meilisearch repositories, I've raised two PRs (one accepted, one rejected), five issues, one feature request and pinged one issue for an update.
Every single time the Meilisearch team has been responsive, communicative and generally a delight to interact with - there are very few projects I would consider better.
I can back this completely. I'm working on a search engine for government transparency records with an NGO and Typesense really solved most of our problems with MeiliSearch, and our experiments with Sonic have been pretty good too.
How well do any of these alternatives work for doing an automatic "More like this" list? I implemented this in Elasticsearch for a client (although it's been so long that I don't recall the specifics of how it works) and as much as I'd like to move away from Java stuff if possible, it'd be a non-starter if I can't replicate that in the new system.
And I personally stopped using them after a really bad experience I had with their "developers". They don't really care about you and it shows, also, they were kind of rude when I reported some bugs to them.
I moved to typesense and it's a whole different world, their creators truly enjoy that you're using their product; same thing with sonic, Valerian is the kind of hacker you'd want as a friend, super talented, super easy going, you could ask a completely dumb question on their GH and he takes the time to explain things to you at length. I know its open source, I know I didn't pay a dime, but for me, that kind of attitude makes it or break it. Plus, you actually get a superior product.
1: https://typesense.org/
2: https://github.com/valeriansaliou/sonic