Meilisearch: A Search Engine That Doesn’t Annoy You
Meilisearch is an open-source search engine written in Rust. Its main selling point is “it just works”: setup takes minutes, and search results are relevant without fine-tuning ranking.
Why Meilisearch
Most search solutions (Elasticsearch, Solr) require serious configuration and administration. Meilisearch took a different path:
- Instant search (search-as-you-type) — results appear on the first keystroke
- Typo tolerance — “kat” finds “cat” without additional configuration
- Filters and facets — all through the REST API
- Relevance sorting — customizable ranking rules
- Excellent documentation — interactive examples, SDKs for all popular languages
Technical Details
Meilisearch runs as a separate service. Data indexing is done via the REST API: you send JSON documents, and you get a search index. Under the hood — a custom engine in Rust, delivering speed and low memory consumption.
It supports: synonyms, stop words, hit highlighting, geosearch. Russian language is supported out of the box.
Limitations
- Maximum index size — around 100 million documents (for very large volumes — Elasticsearch)
- No distributed search in the open-source version
- The open-source license changed from MIT to proprietary in 2023 (but older versions remain MIT)
Verdict
For most projects — websites, e-commerce stores, documentation sites — Meilisearch delivers the ideal balance of simplicity and search quality. I recommend starting with it instead of Elasticsearch.