Case Study: Symfony achieves faster, more relevant documentation search with Meilisearch

Symfony speeds documentation search to under 10 milliseconds with Meilisearch

Symfony, an open-source PHP web development framework, needed a fast and efficient search solution for its vast documentation spanning 30 versions and over 12 million words. Their previous search engines, including Algolia and Elasticsearch, provided inadequate control over parsing and indexing, leading to complaints about inaccurate results and a cumbersome configuration process. This prompted their search for a new vendor, leading them to Meilisearch.

By implementing the self-hosted, open-source Meilisearch engine, Symfony gained the control it needed to parse content and configure indexing rules. Using the Meilisearch PHP integration, a single developer successfully migrated the entire search function. The results were impressive: Meilisearch indexes 800 documents per second, completing a full index of over 85,000 documents in 17 seconds, with most queries returning in under 10 milliseconds. The quality of search results improved dramatically, eliminating all previous negative feedback from their community.

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