Indexing and searching for data in Laravel: what to choose?
Andrii S. 🗿In any modern web project, it is important not only to store data, but also to provide quick and convenient access to it. Whether it's an online store with thousands of products or a CRM system with a large number of customers, search plays a key role in the user's interaction with data. When the data structure becomes more complex and the volume increases significantly, standard SQL queries are no longer enough for effective search. In such cases, Laravel offers a flexible way to integrate with external search engines through the Laravel Scout package. It has been around since version 5 of the framework and is supported up to modern versions 11 and 12.
Laravel Scout is an official package that provides a simple interface for indexing Eloquent models into specialized search engines such as Algolia, Meilisearch, Typesense or Elasticsearch. Although Scout is not included in the basic Laravel shipment, it is easy to install through Composer, allowing you to quickly add full-text search to your application without complicated logic or low-level API requests.
What to choose for your app? What is the difference between Elasticsearch, Algolia and others? I will write briefly about some of them, what are the advantages and disadvantages:
1. Algolia
One of the oldest is Algolia - a cloud-based full-text search SaaS service that offers APIs for indexing and searching data. Under the hood, Algolia uses its own engine optimized for speed and relevance. Data from Laravel (e.g. Eloquent models) is sent to Algolia via API in the form of JSON objects.
How it works:
• Data is indexed in the Algolia cloud, where text is broken down into tokens based on language features.
• Algolia applies its own ranking algorithm (based on relevance, popularity, and other metrics).
• The search is done through API queries that return real-time results with minimal latency. Algolia also supports autocomplete features, synonyms, and geosearch.
Of the obvious advantages:
• Ease of integration: laravel/scout has a ready-made driver and minimal configuration.
• User-friendliness: built-in autocomplete functions, multilingual support, dashboard.
Of the obvious disadvantages:
• Dependence on a third-party service
• Pricing: The free plan is limited, and paid plans can be expensive for data-intensive projects.
2. Elasticsearch and OpenSearch
Elasticsearch is an open distributed data management and search system based on the Apache Lucene search engine. It provides opportunities for indexing, storing, searching and analyzing large amounts of information in real time. The system is developed in the Java language and is distributed under the SSPL (Server Side Public License - open, but not free). It is based on the Lucene library.
OpenSearch is an open-source fork of Elasticsearch developed by Amazon through a license change, it retains compatibility with the Elasticsearch API and has all the features of Elk.
How it works:
• clustering - one or more nodes are created that work together to process and store data. They can be hosted on different physical servers or virtual machines. Each node in a cluster can be configured as a master node or a data node. The former are responsible for coordinating the cluster, while the latter are responsible for storing and processing data.
• indexing - used to organize and store data. Each index is a collection of documents with characteristics and settings. The document contains fields and specific data in JSON format. Indexing uses an inverted index for quick search. An inverted index is a data structure that maps terms (words) to their location in documents, allowing for efficient full-text queries. The system automatically distributes indexes and their fragments (shards) to cluster nodes, providing load balancing and fault tolerance.
• search - during the search, the query is also broken down into tokens, and the engine matches them with the index, returning relevant results taking into account the rating (for example, using the BM25 algorithm).
Of the obvious advantages:
• Suitable for large projects with millions of records thanks to distributed architecture. Can be deployed on your own servers without dependencies on third-party services
• Integration with laravel is possible to use directly through clients, or through scout using a driver
• Text analyzer: multilingual support, stemming, synonyms.
Of the obvious disadvantages:
• Complexity of setup: requires a separate server, cluster management, and monitoring.
• Resource Intensity: Requires a significant amount of RAM and CPU for large indexes.
3. Typesense and Meilisearch
Typesense and Meilisearch are modern open-source full-text search systems created as alternatives to Elasticsearch. They also use an inverted index, but with an emphasis on simplicity and speed.
How it works:
• Typesense uses its own engine written in C++ for fast indexing and search.
• Data is stored as JSON documents, and the text is broken down into tokens with support for basic analysis (for example, prefix search).
• Supports relevance ranking and filtering.
Of the obvious advantages:
• easy installation (one binary file) and minimal configuration.
• Performance - optimized for fast searches even on large datasets.
• Open-source: free for self-hosted options, there are cloud plans.
• low resource consumption - significantly less memory and CPU requirements compared to Elasticsearch.
• Integration is convenient through Scout (Meilisearch has an official driver, Typesense has a community).
Of the obvious disadvantages:
• Limited features: Limited support for complex queries or analytics compared to Elasticsearch.
In my experience, Elasticsearch or its forks were most often used in projects, especially when it comes to large amounts of data and complex filtering. Recently, out of curiosity, I installed and clicked Typesense - and it turned out to be a nice alternative: it is easy to set up, fast, has support for autocompletion and multilingualism, which is important for localized applications. As for Algolia, I didn't have to work with it directly, but it's worth remembering that this is a SaaS solution with a limited free plan, so for many projects it may be less attractive due to the price.
