Meilisearch
Fast search engine API with full-text, vector, and hybrid search
Meilisearch is an open source search engine exposed through an API, designed to provide fast, relevant search experiences for websites and applications. It combines traditional full-text search with optional vector-based semantic retrieval to support hybrid search and AI retrieval workflows.
Key Features
- REST API for indexing documents and running searches
- Search-as-you-type with low-latency results
- Typo tolerance and configurable ranking/relevancy tuning
- Filtering, faceting, and sorting for building rich search UIs
- Geosearch for location-based filtering and ranking
- Vector storage and vector search for semantic retrieval and hybrid search
- API key-based access control, including tenant tokens for multi-tenancy
Use Cases
- Site and application search with instant results and typo tolerance
- E-commerce and catalog search with facets, filters, and sorting
- AI retrieval and RAG pipelines using hybrid (full-text + vector) search
Limitations and Considerations
- Some advanced capabilities (for example sharding and certain snapshot features) are reserved for the Enterprise Edition under a non-open-source license
- Telemetry is enabled by default but can be disabled
Meilisearch is well-suited for teams that want a developer-friendly search API that is easy to integrate, performs well out of the box, and can evolve from classic keyword search to modern hybrid AI retrieval as needs grow.
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