Meilisearch & Typesense

Also Known As

TL;DR

Explanation

Meilisearch (Rust, MIT license) and Typesense (C++, open core) are modern search servers optimised for developer experience. Both provide: BM25 relevance ranking, typo-tolerance, faceting and filtering, geosearch, and sub-50ms response times. Meilisearch has a simpler API and easier setup; Typesense has stronger multi-tenancy support. Both have official PHP SDKs. For most PHP applications needing search, either is a better choice than Elasticsearch due to lower operational overhead and simpler configuration.

Common Misconception

Why It Matters

Common Mistakes

• Indexing data in real-time on every write — batch index updates in a queue worker to avoid blocking requests.
• Not configuring filterable and sortable attributes before indexing — adding them later requires re-indexing.
• Storing all document fields in the search index — only index searchable fields; store others in your DB.
• Not setting searchable attributes priority — title should rank higher than body text.

Code Examples

// LIKE search — slow, no relevance, no typo tolerance:
$results = $pdo->query(
    "SELECT * FROM glossary WHERE term LIKE '%" . $db->escape($q) . "%'
     OR body LIKE '%" . $db->escape($q) . "%'"
)->fetchAll();
// Issues: no ranking, O(n) scan, no typos, injection risk

// Meilisearch PHP SDK:
$client = new \Meilisearch\Client('http://localhost:7700');
$index  = $client->index('glossary');

// Index a term:
$index->addDocuments([[
    'id'       => $term['slug'],
    'term'     => $term['term'],
    'short'    => $term['short'],
    'category' => $term['category'],
]]);

// Search:
$results = $index->search($query, [
    'limit'   => 20,
    'filter'  => 'category = security',
    'sort'    => ['term:asc'],
]);
// Typo-tolerant, ranked, facetable — 5ms response

References

• ↗ https://www.meilisearch.com/docs/reference/api/overview

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