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Ask HN: What are you working on at your company or startup?

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Re: Ask HN: What are you working on at your company or startup?

#21

Post by inertiatic »

I work for a company that develops and maintains an online platform used by quite a few large (academic) publishers.

I'm working on the search side of things, integrating the rest of the platform with the text search service we're using. Some (or a lot!) of it is busywork, but sometimes things get interesting. Mostly when you're out of options with what functionality is offered out of the box and you have to essentially look under the hood at the internals and write your own custom thing to serve whatever weird requirement client X came up with.

Apologies for the vagueness!

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on at your company or startup?

#22

Post by karterk »

tedmiston wrote: post #15
karterk wrote: post #6

Working on an open source, fast, fuzzy search engine that's dead simple to set-up and run: https://github.com/typesense/typesense People who want a good search engine (for instant search etc.) today either need to go for a cloud hosted proprietary offering or have to learn to set-up Elasticsearch and spend a lot of time tweaking it to support typo tolerance. Trying to change that status quo.

Looks pretty cool. Is the idea similar to Algolia or different?

The goal is to be much better than Algolia and Typesense's design is in some ways already so:

1. Sorting order is dynamic, unlike Algolia where you are forced to define a sort order during index creation and you are forced to duplicate your entire index when you want another sort order, e.g. sort by timestamp vs sort by ratings.

2. Run fast on commodity hardware (e.g. a decent EC2 instance) instead of requiring special dedicated hardware that costs a bomb. This is achieved by using highly optimized in-memory data structures instead of relying on fast SSDs and memory mapped I/O approach that Algolia has taken.

3. Disprove the notion that one cannot host their search themselves and need to rely on a cloud service provider. We want to make it really easy to run Typesense and manage it. We have some things to do on this front, but this is definitely the goal.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on at your company or startup?

#24

Post by vira28 »

karterk wrote: post #22
tedmiston wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks pretty cool. Is the idea similar to Algolia or different?

The goal is to be much better than Algolia and Typesense's design is in some ways already so: 1. Sorting order is dynamic, unlike Algolia where you are forced to define a sort order during index creation and you are forced to duplicate your entire index when you want another sort order, e.g. sort by timestamp vs sort by ratings. 2. Run fast on commodity hardware (e.g. a decent EC2 instance) instead of requiring speci…

All the best. As we know, there is a good market for (SAAS) Search As A Service :) . GO client will be great (feature request).
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