Vespa, an AI powered search engine

published on 2022/07/05

Text search

Vespa is a full-featured text search engine and supports both regular text search and fast approximate vector search (ANN). This makes it easy to create high-performing search applications at any scale, whether you want to use traditional techniques, or a modern vector based approach. You can even combine both approaches efficiently in the same query, something no other engine can do.

Recommendation and personalization

Recommendation, personalization and targeting involves evaluating recommender models over content items to select the best ones. Vespa lets you build applications which does this online, typically combining fast vector search and filtering with evaluation of machine-learned models over the items. This makes it possible to make recommendations specifically for each user or situation, using completely up to date information

Question answering

Providing direct answers to questions is useful when creating chatbots, virtual assistants, and to answer some search queries. Modern question answerers combine evaluation of transformer based language models with efficient retrieval of candidate text snippets. Vespa makes it easy to build question answering systems combining the state of the art in research with performance suitable for production.

Semi-structured navigation

Applications such as e-commerce use a combination of structured data and text and need to provide structured navigation - grouping data dynamically for navigation and filtering - in combination with search and recommendation. Vespa provides all the features required for this with great performance, which makes it possible to realize functionally complete applications leveraging structured data on a unified architecture.

Vespa

They just released their 8th version and it looks like a worth alternative to ElasticSearch.