Supercharge your search with

Typesense

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                   Open Source Alternative  
                     to Solr and Elastic        
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Actual ad: x.com/typesense/status/1702152406924980670

About @null (╯°□°)╯

Senior Developer, Catalyst IT, Wellington NZ Web development since 1996 20+ years PHP & search Loves corgis

TL;DR 🤯

Typesense is a search engine for your website that does clever things much faster than anything else you've seen

TL;DR: DEMO 🤯

typesense.org

What you can do 🦸

How does it work?

• Search as you type
• Peerable and distributed for redundancy
• Performance. Cost. Ease-of use

About Typesense

• Created in 2016 by Jason Bosco and Kishore Nallan
• Alternatives were hard to learn or expensive (or both)
• Written in C++

Typesense ❤️ FLOSS

• Free to use, GPLv3
• SaaS hosting available
• "CDN for extremely fast search"

Performance 🏍️

Curated search results 🪜

• Promote one product over another
• Change order of specific search results
• EXAMPLE: Featured pages during a sale

Curated search results 🪜

• Exclude unsupported products
• Demote pages in specific search results
• EXAMPLE: Products out of stock

Synonyms 🔄

• "Silverstripe", "Drupal", and "Laravel" <=> "CMS".
• "smart phone" => "android", "iphone".
• Curations always precede synonyms

Built-in analytics 🧐

• Popular queries
• "No-hit" queries
• Track how often a particular result is clicked on
• Integrates with Matomo and Google

😐

Is that it?

Typesense Dashboard

• Decentralised and offline, or locally installed
• Connects to any installation on Earth with CORS
• Search collections, update schema, server metrics

🔍 Federated search 🔎

• Concurrent searches in a single HTTP request
• Site-wide search with different result sets

Scoped search 🛡️

• Safely offer authenticated privileged search
• Role-based access
• 1 user, 1 key, 1 collection
• 1 group, 1 key, 1 collection

Geospatial searches 🌐

• Radius, or within a polygon, or outside of them
• GIS applications, such as council plans, Homes.co.nz, etc

Language support 🗣️

• Full unicode support, including te reo Māori
• non-Latin alphabets, (Cyrillic, Chinese, etc)
• Snowball Stemmer
• Stop-words for different languages

Text extraction with Tika 📖

• Works perfectly with silverstripe/textextraction
• Extract text from documents
• Containerized, no dependency on Solr

AI and machine-learning 🤖

• Adds context to results.
• Index-time calculations.
• LLM reads and summarises.

AI and machine-learning 🤖

• Image search.
• Audio / video transcriptions.
• Huge win for accessibility

...My webserver needs a GPU? 🤔

• No! Typesense can use your CPU instead
• If you have a GPU available, it can use it
• Compatible with OpenAI, Google, and others
• Turn it off when you're done with it

Key takeaways

• Easy to deploy
• Save on development time
• Performance and user experience
• Cost savings

Time for demos!

• FindXKCD
• Paint colours to CSS variables
• NZ Address Lookup
• Audiobook search
• Federated search with text extraction
• Silverstripe Typesense module

FindXKCD

Paint colours to CSS variables

NZ Address Lookup

Audiobook search

• OpenAI Whisper produces a transcript
• Parsed line-by-line

Federated search

• Replaced CMS Search (one of them)
• Automatically searches every collection
• Multi-threaded search, near-immediate response

Silverstripe Typesense module

• Configure with YML or inside of the CMS
• Syncs remote or local, auto-update on save
• Synonyms and translations
• Under development, contributions welcome!

AWESOME

How do you get started?

Batteries included! 🔋

Getting started 🚀

Very simple JSON based schema:

                        ```js
                        let schema = {
                            'name': 'companies',
                            'fields': [
                              {
                                'name': 'company_name',
                                'type': 'string',
                                'facet': false
                              },
                              {
                                'name': 'num_employees',
                                'type': 'int32',
                                'facet': false
                              },
                              {
                                'name': 'country',
                                'type': 'string',
                                'facet': true
                              }
                            ],
                            'default_sorting_field': 'num_employees'
                          }
                          ```
                    

Automatic schema detection ✨

...or just let Typesense do it for you.

```js
{
    "name": "companies",  
    "fields": [
      {"name": ".*", "type": "auto" }
    ]
}
```  
                    

Field names are regex-based, and so are facets; can provide as much or little detail as you want

Automatic schema detection ✨

Disorganised or poorly structured data set

Typesense will still create a working collection for you.

More info about Typesense

• typesense.org/
• cloud.typesense.org/
• github.com/typesense/typesense

Credits!

Thank you!

• Slack: @null
• github.com/elliot-sawyer
• codeberg.org/0x
• linkedin.com/in/elliot-sawyer/
• hello@cashware.nz