Ever wondered what goes into making the search experience seamless at Vinted? In this post, our Search Platform team take you through their latest imp

Vinted Search Scaling Chapter 8: Goodbye Elasticsearch, Hello Vespa Search Engine | Vinted Engineering

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2024-09-05 18:00:04

Ever wondered what goes into making the search experience seamless at Vinted? In this post, our Search Platform team take you through their latest improvement. Discover how the team’s hard work and expertise allowed us to transition from Elasticsearch to Vespa, a cutting-edge search engine that’s set to elevate how our members find their next second-hand gem.

According to the short commit 9963ab0c171 back in May 2015, Vinted started using Elasticsearch for our item search. Before that, we used the Sphinx search engine, but that’s ancient history now.

Suffice it to say, Elasticsearch served us well for years. But as Vinted grew, so did our data and the complexity of the queries. Eventually, we started to hit the limits of what Elasticsearch could handle, so we set out to find a new, long-term, and scalable solution.

After exploring our options, we settled on Vespa, an open-source, fully-featured search engine and vector database. Originally built by Yahoo!, they became a separate company last year. Vespa supports vector search, lexical search, and searching within structured data, all in the same query. Plus, the integrated machine-learned model inference allows us to apply AI to make sense of our data in real-time.