Typesense - A New High-Performance Search Engine 4 Plone
Typesense is a modern, privacy-friendly, open-source search engine, meticulously designed for performance and user-friendliness.
We implemented Typesense in our Onkopedia project to replace the hopelessly outdated Plone search. Typesense offers the following out-of-the-box features:
- Search-as-you-type
- Autocomplete
- Faceted Navigation
- Geo-Search
- Fuzzy Search
- Vector Search
- Semantic Search
- Recommendations
- LLM Augmentation
- Geo-Distributed Cache
We chose Typesense for Onkopedia for several reasons:
- Modern implementation
- Easy deployment (a single binary) and simple clustering
- JSON as data format (input data, search results)
- Declarative search form with many widgets (including faceted search)
The presentation covers the following aspects:
- Introduction to the technical concepts of Typesense
- Configuration of the data schema for search
- Configuration of the search form and its parameters
- Concrete implementation in the Onkopedia project
The default full-text search feature in Plone is now viewed as insufficient in 2024, lagging behind current technology by two decades. While Solr has been a popular choice for implementing full-text search in Plone, its integration has faced challenges. Therefore, a more advanced and reliable solution is required. Our search for an improved option led us to Typesense, a modern and lightweight full-text indexing solution that offers all the necessary features to create a superior search experience for our portal Onkopedia.
