2021 Q4 Roadmap 🎯

[gmourier]

Hi everyone 👋

First of all, I would like to thank all the MeiliSearch users and especially those who took the time to tell us about their use-cases, frustrations, and ideas to improve MeiliSearch. You can't imagine how vital and important it is for us. Thank you very much.

They say it goes fast when you have fun. I couldn't agree more. It is already time to start a new quarter for MeiliSearch. This one will take us to 2022. We will present our objectives for this last quarter of the year but first of all, let's take a look back at what we did and didn't have time to complete during Q3.

Q3 Retrospective 📽

For Q3, we had a lot of things planned. See original discussion here.

Reducing deal-breakers

The biggest priority for us was to reduce the deal-breakers preventing you from using MeiliSearch. There were extreme demands on several features, and we are very proud to have met our objectives on this subject.

We released the sort feature in v0.22, and guess what? You are not limited to a small number of sort criteria and it completely removes the need to have an index per criteria 😉. Life is simpler with MeiliSearch (well, we're trying hard). If you are coming from Algolia, this is something that should probably make your accountant happy.

📚 Read our guide on sorting

Finally, we are closing Q3 with the release of the geo search feature 🌍✨.

What better way to finish in beauty and complete the first objective of this quarter than by giving you the ability to filter and sort results based on geographic criteria?

📚 Read our guide on geosearch

Patch Indexing speed

We have met the objectives we set for ourselves regarding the improvement of the indexing speed. However, it is not enough for us to be delighted. We already have ideas to improve this, and Q4 will be the occasion to carry out experiments that we hope will make significant progress on this subject.

We have added support for CSV and NDJSON formats to ease the data preparation phase before indexing. These formats also increase the number of documents that can be indexed with the default payload in addition to being less demanding on RAM.

We also reworked the indexer to support larger datasets, it has improved its overall stability.

Stabilize the API format block by block until v1.0

Something that we failed in given the workload already requested for the previous objectives. However, we have made serious progress in preparing that work, and a big part of it will be completed during Q4.

Q4 2021 🎯

We have reduced the number of objectives for the end of the year; however, we will not twiddle our thumbs. You will see that essential features are asked and need to be done before going to aspects strictly related to search parts for your end-users.

The goal of Q4 is to continue to reduce deal-breakers, improve the user experience while making MeiliSearch more and more mature and production-ready.

Become more mature and reliable

• Make all write operations asynchronous and stabilize the tasks APIs. It's a requirement for the next step.
• Implement the first version of high availability and remove the single point of failure on search routes.
• Solve Multi-Tenancy use-case. You will be able to isolate user data within the same index. In the meantime, we will also make MeiliSearch more secure. We will introduce ACL to manage access for your teams.
• We will remove the 1000 word positions limit per attribute to avoid you splitting a field into several other fields to make it fully searchable
• A complete cleanup of our error format and associated messages. This will allow us to improve the quality of life of developers encountering an error. It will also prevent us from having regressions on this subject by listing exhaustively the error variants and implementing tests.
• Experiment with new data structures and philosophy to improve indexing speed. It should also facilitate future evolutions concerning using MeiliSearch at scale.

Links will be updated as specifications are approved.

As you can see, the end of 2021 will be rich in technical challenges. This quarter will allow the product team to prepare a thunderous beginning of 2022 in terms of new search features 😉

A big thank you from all the MeiliSearch team for your support.

See you soon 👋