Hey there 👋, let me introduce to you Typesense: a search as a service engine that you can use in your projects that involve querying, retrieving and indexing data.

🔹 What is Typesense?

It is an open-source, typo tolerant search engine that delivers fast and relevant results out-of-the-box. & has been built from scratch to offer a delightful & modern search experience.

From instant search to autosuggest, to faceted search, it has got you covered.

As I aforementioned, Typesense is a tool in the Search as a Service category of a tech stack.

Think of Typesense as an Algolia alternative with rich features, customisation and development suited for your needs.

🔹 Deployment Options

One of the reasons I fell in love with Typesense is self-hosting ability. To me, this is top-notch and the CDN-like Geo-Distributed clusters that are supported in self-hosted and Saas options.

They also have a managed service called Typesense Cloud.

🔹 API Clients & Integrations

You can implement and integrate Typesense with these client libraries;

📌 JavaScript
📌 Python
📌 Ruby

Typesense has a RESTful API so it can be used with any HTTP library in any programming language, even the ones not listed above. The client libraries are just thin wrappers around Typesense's HTTP API.

Read More

🔹 OS Support

📌 Linux
📌 Mac OS X
📌 Windows: The implementation & installation involves using WSL.

For Full installation, Visit the Installation page

🔹 Usecases

If your website visitors or app users are unable to find or effectively utilize your search bar, you will not be delivering the full benefit of your search engine.

Typesense is here to fix that with rich integrations, support and UI building and you can literally implore this if you are building an online store, book site, e-commerce, music platform, dataset querying etc.

The snip below is from the song search API library that is able to filter values, facets and indexes while doing a real-time search.

🔹 Why Typesense?

✔ Open-source & Free
✔ Handles typographical errors elegantly
✔ Simple to set-up, manage & deploy
✔ Easy to tailor your search results to perfection
✔ Meticulously designed and optimized for speed
✔ Out-of-the-box dev experience
✔ Search as you type
✔ Query field weights & boosting
✔ REST API

🔹 The Community

The community is still growing and we might see its impact and adoption soon since most developers prefer a technology that they can control, contribute and develop along with.

I believe the community will grow exponentially due to its rich documentation, demos and training available for beginners.

Join the Slack community to connect with the amazing Typesense developers.

🔹 DocSearch Scraper

Yeah, I love web-scraping and anything that has this attracts me and I am still figuring out how I will implement this.

It is a fork of Algolia's awesome DocSearch Scraper, customized to index data in Typesense. It is a python implementation.

You'd typically set up this scraper to run on your documentation site and then use Javascript to add a search bar to your site.

Read detailed step-by-step instructions on how to configure and setup the scraper on Typesense's dedicated documentation site:

🔹 Other Notes

Aviyel is a community-driven monetization platform for Open Source Projects and this is where I picked up this project listing. View project on Aviyel

🔹 Useful links

📌 Official Docs
📌 GitHub Repos
📌 Official Website
📌 Aviyel Project

🔹 What Next

I am planning to read more about this great search tool and see if I can implement it in the NFT Collection website that I am building.

Join me as we discover the hidden treasures of Typesense and we start making sense with our searches using modern search APIs as we build meaningful search-embedded projects.

🔹 Conclusion

Hope this was a good intro to Typesense and I will be sharing articles related to using it, especially python implementation.

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