Meilisearch is a best of breed state of the art full test search engine written in Rust, fully Open Source, but with a commercial offering.
It is evidently a great replacement for Elastic when you need fulltext - but even more so of Algolia. And coupled with something like Crawl4AI or one of the other crawlers it can give you huge mileage as a general purpose search engine. Simple. Fast. Robust.
Conflict of interest statement: I have none. It's just an incredibly lovely piece of software.
The API is pretty, usable and very easy to understand and the client libs are top-notch too (full disclosure: I only used the Golang, Python and JS ones).
For the vector retrieval side of the house: with Meilisearch it is basically a setting on an Index. That’s it. You tell it which embedding model / service to use, you give it a URL and an API key. It is going to take care of everything by itself. Nothing to do. No pipelines. No Llama index. No langchain. Nothing. A setting.
Actually wrote a full-blown medium post just to say how cool this is.
I have been using Elastic since version 0.2 and as far as FT generally... I kinda have 30 years of track record in choosing winners.
Ask me about CPL from AOL one of these days.
