Case Study: PubChem achieves scalable, responsive chemical search with autocomplete and faceting using Manticore Search

Pubchem - largest free chemical informatics web site in the world

PubChem, the NCBI/NLM group and the world's largest free chemical informatics website (covering ~103M compounds, 254M substances, 269M bioactivities and more), needed a scalable full‑text search across roughly 10 TB and many collections after Solr failed to keep up. They adopted the Sphinx/Manticore search engine and its C++ client library provided by Manticore Search to meet that challenge.

Manticore Search implemented a Sphinx‑based solution with the C++ client, deploying search autocomplete (suggestions after 2–3 letters) and faceting to filter results across compounds, substances, bioassays, literature and patents. The result was a scalable, responsive search for PubChem’s >100M‑record index and 10 TB dataset, improved discoverability (autocomplete and faceted counts visible in the UI) and a public endorsement from PubChem for the Sphinx/Manticore engine.

Pubchem