+1 to everybody that mentioned that Vespa has great vector support _and_ lexical filtering. And you likely will end up needing both.
Don't sleep on some of its newer features like multi-vector document fields, either…
Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company
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Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company
#62Vespa was actually very cool at the time as a document-oriented search engine, occupying the same niche as Solr and elaborations of that like ElasticSearch. But I don't know if it's competitive today. This blog post says it's "developed by Yahoo" which is I guess true. But it was originally an acquisition, largely developed by a team in Norway, and apparently most Vespa development still happens there.
Norway also had the FAST search company acquired by Microsoft. Is Norway particularly good at making search stuff?
Actually, Vespa comes out of the same FAST company. Yahoo bought Overture/Altavista and a lot of other web search companies in 2003, including the web search division of FAST. The Enterprise search division of FAST was later acquired by Microsoft.
Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wasps are a nuisance known for causing pain and property destruction. "vespa" as a name for a product always seemed strange to me. At least the scooters were vaguely waspish looking and buzzed around town. What's yahoo's excuse?
Vespa was the internal code name for the project going back to 2005ish, vertical search platform.
Probably should've been Vespla by that logic
Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company
#64Piaggio is not gonna be happy that someone has called their company Vespa.
“vespa” means wasp in Italian, and it seems unlikely that they’re in the same trademark categories.
I'll go create my line of scooters and call it Google, see if their lawyers care about not being in the same trademark category.
The Vespa is an iconic and well known brand in Italy and worldwide. If Piaggio isn't litigating it, I wonder what their lawyers are even doing.
Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company
#65Anyone able to share the definitive history of the polar bears that visited the office? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/Polar_Be...
It had all started a bit earlier with a colleague (I assume that's you up there, jkb79 :) pulling the leg of a guy visiting us from the Bangalore office, about the polar bears roaming the streets of Trondheim. We just thought we'd prank him a bit about having more dangerous animals than they did in India. Nothing too serious.
So a few months later I woke up early one morning and saw it had been snowing all night. I made sure to get over to the office before the traffic started ruining the image of barren, desolate place where you could entertain the idea of polar bears roaming the streets, looking for young, fresh engineering meat.
I took a few photos, walked inside, and got busy looking for photos of polar bears that could fit into this idea of upping the Dangerous Wildlife War between India and the home of the proper vikings.
So I did a little bit of photoshopping, uploaded it to my Flickr account, and sent the link to a few other yahoos around the world. We had a bit of fun with it, but I don't think anyone with access to this worldwide web of information will be too fooled. (It's quite easy to figure out that there are no polar bears on the Norwegian mainland, so I've never been too bothered about leaving it up there.)
You can see the ehm... original at https://www.flickr.com/photos/eirikref/3262204184 for a few of the comments and fun from back then.
Edit: So that's about as definite as you'll ever get it. And I'll never again admit to it being photoshopped in any shape or form ;)
Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company
#66This is fabulous and I’m very excited to see where this project goes.
It definitely has legs and if the team understands just how enormous the potential could be, annd especially why they could disrupt, I’m even more eager to see what they do.
Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company
#67I was at Yahoo almost a decade ago, when vector search within Vespa was first being rolled out in production use cases. It was already serving similarity search requests for Flickr back then. Even though I'm with Zilliz/Milvus now, I wholeheartedly support and recommend folks check out and try Vespa. Congrats to the Vespa team! EDIT: For folks on Twitter, you should follow Jo ( https://twitter.com/jobergum ) from Ves…
Thank you for the shout-out Frank!
Off topic... looking forward to more engineers moving to Mastodon. I have Twitter/X blocked at DNS level and still fairly frequently encounter interesting accounts that I can't check out.
Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company
#68Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company
#69Anyone able to share the definitive history of the polar bears that visited the office? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/Polar_Be...
It had all started a bit earlier with a colleague (I assume that's you up there, jkb79 :) pulling the leg of a guy visiting us from the Bangalore office, about the polar bears roaming the streets of Trondheim. We just thought we'd prank him a bit about having more dangerous animals than they did in India. Nothing too serious. So a few months later I woke up early one morning and saw it had been snowing all night. I m…
[deleted]
Re: Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for the shout-out Frank!
Off topic... looking forward to more engineers moving to Mastodon. I have Twitter/X blocked at DNS level and still fairly frequently encounter interesting accounts that I can't check out.
Every time I see Twitter/X here, I want to say this.