Solr searching engine is bad

[gotwf]

@volanar This looks promising. At least upon cursory examination. Have you used this with NodeBB?

+1 re; the ElasticSearch comments.

[volanar]

@gotwf said in Solr searching engine is bad:

@volanar This looks promising. At least upon cursory examination. Have you used this with NodeBB?

+1 re; the ElasticSearch comments.

I have used this on my magento platform projects. This is very cool, search on the platform is no different than search on amazon. What is good about such a search is that there are a lot of analytics, it is ideal there. But meilisearch can do the same. And many users want to move from elasticsearch to meilisearch. For small online stores, this is critical when the database and the platform itself consume 2 gigabytes of RAM, and elastic consumes 1 gigabyte of RAM by default, for its normal operation. And how often is search used compared to other platform features?

[sharonyue]

Is nodebb gonna support meilisearch?

[julian]

@sharonyue A plugin will have to be made to connect to Meilisearch. At this time we have other priorities, but anyone with the necessary technical skills can make the plugin.

[gotwf]

@julian said in Solr searching engine is bad:

@sharonyue A plugin will have to be made to connect to Meilisearch. At this time we have other priorities, but anyone with the necessary technical skills can make the plugin.

I do not have the code slinger chops for this but have meilisearch looks worthy of the effort and may well be the next Solr, errmmm... ElasiticSearch... errmmm... Yahoo!!???

In any case, it would be cool to see this happen.

[oplik0]

@sharonyue I quickly made a plugin for Meilisearch:
https://github.com/oplik0/nodebb-plugin-meilisearch

Note that it's a very early version and largely untested - it worked for me for trivial test cases (literally a few posts :V), but there aren't many knobs to adjust the settings with and it might very well be quite fragile at the moment. So I don't recommend running it in production just yet - I'll work a bit more on it probably some time next week.

[gotwf]

@oplik0 I've too much else personal project wise on my plate just now to check this out but thank you! I look forward to giving it a spin.

[crazycells]

@oplik0 thanks oplik0, looking forward to testing this

[oplik0]

It's still not well tested, but v0.3.0 is the first version that I'd consider actually running

Seems to work fine and now ACP has actually useful settings (almost everything that Meilisearch allows you to change actually). Here it is with default settings:

I still want to add some progress bar for indexing (and actually make it work in the background, currently it might freeze the forum) and perhaps look into a front-end integration that Meilisearch offers.

[oplik0]

I got reindexing working mostly fine, with a live progress bar and actually in the background. So v0.5 should have everything this plugin needs now.

I'll still look into a possibly better frontend integration with their libraries, but I'd probably need to replace the existing NodeBB search preview. There is also a bit more sorting/filtering I want to pass to Meilisearch instead of leaving it to NodeBB later, but that's not a big deal.

I'm also considering if some LRU cache for recent searches is needed, but I'll have to test performance on a larger instance than my tiny tests I'll probably end up adding one with low TTL though.

So since it's close to release-ready I created a topic for it: https://community.nodebb.org/topic/16658/nodebb-plugin-meilisearch-use-meilisearch-as-a-full-text-search-backend