snikolaev (u/snikolaev)

snikolaev commented on Manticore Search: Fast, efficient, drop-in replacement for Elasticsearch github.com/manticoresoftw... · Posted by u/klaussilveira

pQd · 5 months ago

manticore, earlier sphinx search, has been rock solid for us for the past 16 years. now serving searches across nearly 300M short documents. we're using it in the old mode - where full index is re-created every 24h.

it's great to see that the project is alive and adding embeddings-related functions needed for semantic search.

snikolaev · 5 months ago

Great to hear! 16 years is impressive. Glad to see the new semantic features caught your eye — we're excited to keep improving the project.

snikolaev commented on Manticore Search: Fast, efficient, drop-in replacement for Elasticsearch github.com/manticoresoftw... · Posted by u/klaussilveira

lokl · 5 months ago

I've been using Sphinx for 20 years for full-text search with a custom stemmer. I considered switching to Manticore, but didn't see a huge need to do so, because Sphinx still works well for me and requires zero maintenance. Any big new features that might entice me to switch? (I only have a few GB of indexes, covering a few million documents.)

snikolaev · 5 months ago

If your setup works fine and doesn't need any maintenance, there's really no reason to switch to something else. But once you upgrade to a newer version of Sphinx and it crashes, I personally feel more comfortable knowing I can report the issue on GitHub and expect it to be fixed eventually. Unfortunately, that's not how it works with Sphinx.

Speaking of features, both Sphinx (as a closed-source project) and Manticore (as an open-source project) have added some nice improvements during last years. But again, if you're happy with the 20-year-old version, there's probably nothing to worry about.

snikolaev commented on Manticore Search: Fast, efficient, drop-in replacement for Elasticsearch github.com/manticoresoftw... · Posted by u/klaussilveira

cess11 · 5 months ago

I like Manticore. It's easy to setup, lean on resources and quite fast. I use it when I want to quickly pour a lot of semi-structured text into a database for exploratory browsing and prototype web applications.

The auto-bolding of query terms in responses is quite convenient and has allowed me to skip annoying little regexes many times. Maybe other engines have it too and I never noticed?

snikolaev · 5 months ago

Thank you!

snikolaev commented on Manticore Search: Fast, efficient, drop-in replacement for Elasticsearch github.com/manticoresoftw... · Posted by u/klaussilveira

9dev · 5 months ago

What’s the story on nested documents, complex Boolean queries, custom script scoring, pipelined aggregations, vectors and so on?

snikolaev · 5 months ago

Complex boolean queries work great. Manticore also supports over 20 full-text operators — a lot more than Elasticsearch. That's one reason it's popular in areas like patent and legal search, where strong full-text matching is especially important.

Custom script scoring is available - https://manual.manticoresearch.com/Extensions/UDFs_and_Plugi...

Vectors - yes. Recent blog post on it https://manticoresearch.com/blog/quantization/

Pipelined aggregations - no.

Nested documents - no, but Manticore supports INNER JOIN and LEFT JOIN.

snikolaev commented on Manticore Search: Fast, efficient, drop-in replacement for Elasticsearch github.com/manticoresoftw... · Posted by u/klaussilveira

mdaniel · 5 months ago

> dynamic mapping

I didn't dig into the docs, but now having seen the "create table whatever(name string)" makes me super paranoid: does your mention of "dynamic mapping" as a missing feature mean that if a document shows up with <<{"name":"Fred","birthday":"1970-12-25"}>> it'll drop the document?

snikolaev · 5 months ago

There's a JSON field type that lets you use any schema, but it doesn't support full-text filtering. If you are not using it and if your next document has a different schema, it will cause an error when you try to insert it.

snikolaev commented on Manticore Search: Fast, efficient, drop-in replacement for Elasticsearch github.com/manticoresoftw... · Posted by u/klaussilveira

merb · 5 months ago

That is the most bullshit thing I’ve read in a while. Send data to manticore via logstash does not make you an elasticsearch replacement. And a lot of elasticsearch use cases are not using kibana.

(Logstash can basically ingest and output to everything…)

snikolaev · 5 months ago

But not everything works with Kibana. What are some well known alternatives besides Manticore?

snikolaev commented on Manticore Search: Fast, efficient, drop-in replacement for Elasticsearch github.com/manticoresoftw... · Posted by u/klaussilveira

another_twist · 5 months ago

What are the missing features though ? Autoshard, something related to ranking ? Also curious, why not go with algolia which as I understand kinda built for product facing search use cases ?

snikolaev · 5 months ago

Autosharding, authentication, dynamic mapping.

snikolaev commented on Manticore Search: Fast, efficient, drop-in replacement for Elasticsearch github.com/manticoresoftw... · Posted by u/klaussilveira

9dev · 5 months ago

If I had to guess, I would say it’s the 20x smaller feature set compared to Elasticsearch.

We built a custom search engine on top of Elasticsearch. Our query builder regularly constructs optimised queries that would be impossible to implement in any of the touted alternatives or replacements, which almost always focus on simple full text search, because that’s everything the developers ever used ES for. There’s a mindboggingly huge number of additional features that you need for serious search engines though, and any contender will have to support at least a subset of these to deserve that title in the first place.

I’m keeping an eye on the space, but so far, I’m less than impressed with everything I’ve seen.

snikolaev · 5 months ago

It's somewhat smaller, but I believe not 20 times smaller. Among the major features, probably only authentication and auto-sharding are missing. Both are already in progress. On the other hand, the main feature missing in Elasticsearch is proper SQL support, which many Manticore users really appreciate.

snikolaev commented on Manticore Search: Fast, efficient, drop-in replacement for Elasticsearch github.com/manticoresoftw... · Posted by u/klaussilveira

sontek · 5 months ago

I don't believe meilisearch or typesense are API compatible with Elasticsearch. I think the best part of this new tool is its a drop-in replacement.

Edit: Nevermind, in another part of this thread the maintainer said:

    We do get compared to Elasticsearch a lot. While we support some of its APIs, Manticore isn't a drop-in replacement

Which conflicts with the README: "Drop-in replacement for E in the ELK stack"

snikolaev · 5 months ago

It's not a drop-in replacement in general, but it can be seen as a drop-in replacement for Elasticsearch in the ELK stack because: - You can send data to Manticore using Logstash (L) - You can visualize the data using Kibana (K)

Sorry for the confusion :)

snikolaev commented on Manticore Search: Fast, efficient, drop-in replacement for Elasticsearch github.com/manticoresoftw... · Posted by u/klaussilveira

sontek · 5 months ago

The main tag line says "Drop-in replacement for E in the ELK stack" -- but here you say you aren't a drop-in replacement.

Does this mean you've at least implemented every API that Kibana requires?

snikolaev · 5 months ago

Not every, but Kibana can be used with Manticore with some limitations - https://github.com/manticoresoftware/kibana-demo