Typesense

Description

Typesense is an open-source, typo-tolerant search engine optimized for instant "search-as-you-type" experiences, and a self-hosted alternative to Algolia. It keeps indexes in memory to return results in milliseconds and is designed for a gentle learning curve — good relevance defaults, a simple REST API, and few knobs to tune. Alongside keyword search it supports vector and hybrid semantic search.

Features

• Typo tolerance: Configurable fuzzy matching that corrects misspellings automatically.
• Fast faceting & filtering: Real-time facet counts, filtering, and sorting over large datasets.
• Semantic & hybrid search: Built-in vector search and rerankers, with optional LLM embeddings.
• Geo search: Radius and bounding-box queries with distance sorting.
• High availability: Raft-based clustering for replicated, fault-tolerant deployments.
• Ecosystem: Official SDKs plus InstantSearch, Next.js, Laravel Scout, and Firebase adapters.

Technology Stack

• Single self-contained C++ binary (also distributed as a Docker image)
• RocksDB for on-disk persistence; indexes served from RAM
• Raft consensus for clustering
• REST/HTTP API with official client libraries

Requirements

• Linux host or Docker
• RAM roughly proportional to index size (the dataset must fit in memory)
• A persistent data directory and an API key for bootstrapping