Show HN: Self-Hostable Algolia DocSearch Replacement

I have to say Algolia is underwhelming (even after all these years). Perhaps I'm using it wrong, but I often more quickly find the comment or story I'm searching for via a targeted search using Google. I should give Bing a try as I've been been getting better finance related results there lately--especially when trying to locate ratings and / or other docs related to newly issued securities.

bryanrasmussen · a year ago

I had to use Algolia in a recent ecommerce solution, I think e-commerce really is the sweet spot for what Algolia offers, quick setup not a lot of need to mess around with your rankings etc. with very simple content.

I'm used to Solr and ElasticSearch for most sites I've ran, which tend to be information sites dense where you need to be able to control rankings to get the best results, which HN is much closer to than to an e-commerce site.

shooker435 · a year ago

Have you tried Vertex AI Search for Retail?

lnrdgmz · a year ago

Agreed. I dread having to use Algolia search on documentation these days. The search results feel pretty naively selected, and the UI is pretty poor. I get that people want to deploy static sites, but can we please find a way to bring back search _pages_?

yujonglee · a year ago

> I dread having to use Algolia search on documentation these days.

agreed.

> but can we please find a way to bring back search _pages_?

could you please explain what do you mean?

Can you talk about how you implemented search-as-you-type? Doing so with semantic search seems tricked given the roundtrips needed to compute embeddings on the fly (assuming the use of OpenAI embeddings)

yujonglee · a year ago

sure - implementing a search-as-you-type experience with an ai-powered feature was what i wanted to do as well. it doesn't use embeddings at the moment. when you type a short query like 'openai,' it simply runs a basic query using Typesense. however, if you enter a question-like query, such as 'how to llimit api cost,' it transforms it into multiple queries, like 'budget' and 'limit.'

in the self-hosted version, it use the CHAT_COMPLETION_MODEL env variable for selecting the llm model. in our cloud version, we use a fine-tuned version of 4o-mini that we will eventually move to a smaller model like llama8b or even 1b.

pjot · a year ago

Got it! I saw this in the code and assumed you were using embeddings def evaluate(input: shared.EvaluationInput): ds = Dataset.from_list(input.dataset) metrics = [metric_map[metric] for metric in input.metrics]

    llm = ChatOpenAI(
        model_name=shared.LANGUAGE_MODEL,
        base_url=os.environ["OPENAI_API_BASE"],
        api_key=os.environ["OPENAI_API_KEY"],
    )

    embeddings = OpenAIEmbeddings(
        model=shared.EMBEDDING_MODEL,
        base_url=os.environ["OPENAI_API_BASE"],
        api_key=os.environ["OPENAI_API_KEY"],
    )

simonw · a year ago

Took me a little poking around to figure out what the underlying search engine was: it's https://typesense.org/ hosted in a Docker container.

Yes, we initially started with Paradedb but moved to Typesense for a search-as-you-type experience. We also have an additional layer for query transformation using an LLM though. (only when query is "question-like".

e.g:

if you go to 'https://docs.litellm.ai/' and search for 'how to limit API cost,' it will map the query to 'budget.'

Deleted Comment

Oh neat, is that this bit? https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fastrepl/canary/c1f03cbbee...

ij23 · a year ago

Canary is awesome! we use Canary for our doc search at LiteLLM (you can see it here: https://docs.litellm.ai/docs/)

It's really useful to be able to specify the search space for a specific query (example: Canary allows search for the query "sagemaker" on our docs or on our github issues )

metabeard · a year ago

The search modal says, "Search by Algolia".

click cute yellow bird next to the searchbar.

Onavo · a year ago

You should add support for tinkerbird, so the index can be statically generated and queried without a backend.

https://github.com/wizenheimer/tinkerbird

whilenot-dev · a year ago

Just played around with tinkerbird on Tinkerboard[0]... it doesn't seem to get good results with the provided example data. Why do you think a support for it would be worthwhile?

[0]: https://tinkerboard.vercel.app/

Getting good results involves tuning, good models, and well defined prompts, the demo not implementing a good RAG has nothing to do with its vector search performance. I suggest reading up on how the technology works.

jgalt212 · a year ago

TnS-hun · a year ago

In Firefox the "Search for anything" input does not get focused after opening the search dialog.

nice catch! just downloaded firework to test it :) will fix it shortly

skeptrune · a year ago

This is sweet. I do think the styling on the component could be a bit cleaner though.

Thanks! Could you point out any specific part of the UI that you think could be improved?

techn00 · a year ago

Opening up the search needs a softer animation. Take https://ui.shadcn.com/ as an example

alexbouchard · a year ago

Been looking for something like this! Doc search just hasn't kept up with what's possible now and is such a hassle to get the indexing to work properly. Will try it out!

please let me know how it goes! we have Discord link in the top navbar: https://getcanary.dev/