Been a happy user of MS in production for https://notado.app for many years, and someone from MS even reached out to me a few years ago thanking me for my write-up of syncing Postgres records to MS[1], saying they used it as a reference for something they later shipped.

I haven't kept up with the latest updates, all these new AI references don't inspire confidence at all, but the older version I'm running is chugging along and doing a great job.

[1]: https://notado.substack.com/p/how-notado-syncs-data-from-pos...

Meilisearch is great, used it for a quick demo

However if you need a full-text search similar to Apache Lucene, my go-to options are based on Tantivy

Tantivy https://github.com/quickwit-oss/tantivy

Asian language, BM25 scoring, Natural query language, JSON fields indexing support are all must-have features for me

Quickwit - https://github.com/quickwit-oss/quickwit - https://quickwit.io/docs/get-started/quickstart

ParadeDB - https://github.com/paradedb/paradedb

I'm still looking for a systematic approach to make a hybrid search (combined full-text with embedding vectors).

Any thoughts on up-to-date hybrid search experience are greatly appreciated

We have been using Meilisearch with firebase for years and it has always worked great. I just wish they would update the extension on the firebase extensions hub[1] because the current version available uses node 14 which is not supported by cloud functions on GCP so the extension is not usable at all. What's weird is that the latest version available on their repo has upgraded the node version but they are not offering it in the extensions hub.

[1]: https://extensions.dev/extensions/meilisearch/firestore-meil...

One thing to _always_ dig into is how your hybrid search solution filters the vector search index. This is not at all standardized, often overlooked, but when you want "top X most similar to query by embedding, but also in Y category/match Z search terms" its the core operation your hybrid search is doing

Here's a rollup of algorithms... https://bsky.app/profile/softwaredoug.bsky.social/post/3lmrm...

On their homepage, using vanilla search, I entered the first word of a particular funny movie and it was third result.

Switching on the AI toggle, I entered the same word, and got no results.