Thoughts on Algolia (vs Solr & Elasticsearch) - OpenSource Connections

#opensource | Andre Zayarni | 61 comments

We have a long history with MongoDB. Many years ago, when I was still writing code myself, NoSQL was a novel concept. I was sold on its simplicity and natural compatibility with the Node stack. I used Mongo for all my side projects. For work, we still preferred SQL DBs, though. Fast forward to the early days of Qdrant, MongoDB Ventures reached out, and we had several conversations; they considered investing in our seed round. Their product managers and engineers were reaching out and praising our solution. At some point, they revealed that they are going to add vectors to their Atlas search product just by using Lucene. So what, who cares? At Qdrant, we’re not retrofitting anything. We’re building a dedicated vector search engine - from the ground up. If someone wants to replicate what we do? Go ahead, we are #opensource. But here’s where it gets frustrating. We have put in the hard work building our community and attracting prominent people in the AI landscape to use our product and create content about it. We have built our Qdrant Stars program to engage with the community even closely. qdrant.tech/stars So, what does it have to do with Mongo? Well, they just made a clever shortcut and reached out to our Qdrant Stars program members and influencers from our community, making them an offer they could not decline. I do not blame the content creators, it is their daily work and it is an excellent opportunity for them, guys, I can totally understand you, no worries. But let's call it what it is: A multi-billion-dollar company is now trying to buy its way into a community built by an early-stage startup, not them. We don’t fear competition. But when the incumbents start copying your strategy and poaching your community, it says one thing loud and clear: We’re making the right people nervous. We’ll never outspend Mongo, and we don’t need to. We have something they can’t copy or buy: a fast-growing, mission-driven, technically superior open platform - and a community that sees through the noise. So to the engineers, researchers, and creators who believe in open innovation, performance that doesn’t compromise, and communities that are earned, not acquired: you know where to find us. And to the MongoDB marketing geniuses: take on Elastic, take on Redis, take on Oracle, and others of your calibre, but leave Qdrant and other startups like us alone. | 61 comments on LinkedIn

AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source

Amazon’s latest offering highlights the economic challenges facing open source companies — and Amazon should pay attention.

Welcome to SearXNG — SearXNG Documentation (2026.3.29+7ac4ff39f)

SearXNG is a free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from up to 250 search services. Users are neither tracked nor profiled. Additionally, SearXNG can be used over Tor for online anonymity.

The enshittification of online search? Privacy and quality of Google, Bing and Apple in coding advice

Even though currently being challenged by ChatGPT and other large-language models (LLMs), Google Search remains one of the primary means for many individuals to find information on the internet. Interestingly, the way that we retrieve information on the web has hardly changed ever since Google was established in 1998, raising concerns as to Google's dominance in search and lack of competition. If the market for search was sufficiently competitive, then we should probably see a steady increase in search quality over time as well as alternative approaches to the Google's approach to search. However, hardly any research has so far looked at search quality, which is a key facet of a competitive market, especially not over time. In this report, we conducted a relatively large-scale quantitative comparison of search quality of 1,467 search queries relating to coding advice in October 2023. We focus on coding advice because the study of general search quality is difficult, with the aim of learning more about the assessment of search quality and motivating follow-up research into this important topic. We evaluate the search quality of Google Search, Microsoft Bing, and Apple Search, with a special emphasis on Apple Search, a widely used search engine that has never been explored in previous research. For the assessment of search quality, we use two independent metrics of search quality: 1) the number of trackers on the first search result, as a measure of privacy in web search, and 2) the average rank of the first Stack Overflow search result, under the assumption that Stack Overflow gives the best coding advice. Our results suggest that the privacy of search results is higher on Bing than on Google and Apple. Similarly, the quality of coding advice -- as measured by the average rank of Stack Overflow -- was highest on Bing.

IndieSearch

I built a prototype for client-side, fully distributed search for the IndieWeb — check out the demo & a little explainer.

Web search· Ollama Blog

A new web search API is now available in Ollama. Ollama provides a generous free tier of web searches for individuals to use, and higher rate limits are available via Ollama’s cloud.

OpenSearch description format - XML | MDN

The OpenSearch description format can be used to describe the web interface of a search engine. This allows a website to describe a search engine for itself, so that a browser or other client application can use that search engine. OpenSearch is supported by (at least) Firefox, Edge, Safari, and Chrome. (See Reference Material for links to other browsers' documentation.)

searxng/searxng

SearXNG is a free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from various search services and databases. Users are neither tracked nor profiled.

GGV Capital API-First Index

At GGV Capital, we are focused on finding the most promising developer-first software companies commercializing APIs, having already backed Agora, Authing, Pinwheel, Mindee and Stream. We are going all-in on API companies because they will fundamentally simplify software development. APIs will allow developers to offload lower-value and time-consuming components of application development so they can focus on higher-value work. For example, instead of a company asking its developers to spend months writing code to accept payments for its software, they can get up and running quickly with Stripe. For authentication, they can use Auth0. For chat, they can use Stream.We expect the use of APIs to continue growing exponentially in the next few years, and many promising companies are building with an API-first approach, including Algoia for search, Mux for video, and Commerce Layer for e-commerce. The public markets are also taking notice. Twilio and Agora are now publicly traded. Okta acquired Auth0 for $6.5B. SoFi acquired Galileo for $1.2B. We expect this trend to continue.2023 Q2 Update Highlights 1) Investment activity continues at a slower pace in Q22) Cohere raised one of the largest funding rounds of Q2 at $270M 3) Two additions to the API-First Index: Clerk & LibLab‍2023 Q1 Update Highlights1) Slower investment activity continues in Q1 2023 2) Stripe raised one of the largest funding rounds of 2023 at $6.5B3) Two additions to the API-First Index: Finch & SyncteraIn 2022, we tracked VC deal activity for 120+ API-first companies across categories. Find out what we learned:2022 Year in Review Report.‍‍GGV Capital is tracking 150+ API-first companies. We have now expanded the API-First Index to include the 60+ private companies that have raised $50M+ in funding. With this Index, we are focusing on API-first companies and have not included the broader and flourishing API economy (but are also very excited about this, having backed Kong and Tray.io!). If you are building API-first, we would love to meet you! Please contact us at apifirstindex@ggvc.com to be included in our list.

Staan — The European Search API for developers & AI

An independent European web search index. Real-time, source-cited results from €2 per 1,000 requests — 1,000 free each month.

The Great Open Source Debate: 4 Things to Consider

Build, deploy and manage your applications on any cloud or your own servers.

auxolotl.org

An alternative to the Nix ecosystem.

eLife receives Wellcome boost to build open publishing ecosystem

The new investment will back development of collaborative publishing tools and services for the benefit of the global scholarly community.