Discussing ES Percolation Feature's Applicability to Typesense

Hi, we have a custom hosted elasticsearch instance, but are going through a rearchitecture. We have been targeting algolia, but was still looking around due to requiring us to manually implement our notification functionality. We had been working on migrating from a brute force approach to ES percolators. The idea being we save each “search” as a document, then we can ask elasticsearch “here is a new document, which searches match it?“. When we have the searches that match it, our mapping of users with that search tells us who to send a notification to. Our original approach requires us to essentially loop through all relevant searches each time a new piece of content is published to determine which searches match. I didn’t see percolator-like functionality mentioned in the Typesense docs, nor was it called out in the comparison. If this isn’t something supported by typesense, then it might be worth highlighting there

TIL about the percolation feature in ES! We don’t have this in Typesense.

ES has such a breadth of features that it’s going to be hard to list every single one of them in a comparison matrix, especially because ES doesn’t cover just site/app search but a whole variety of adjacent use cases (like the percolation feature).

Algolia and Typesense on the other hand, we focus just on site/app search. So the features listed in that matrix are from the point of view of the common features you’d need to implement site/app search.

Thanks for taking a look. Yeah, content alerting seems to be a pretty often-available feature for websites (ebay, rvtrader, etc), but there doesn’t seem to be a lot out there right now besides just rolling your own fairly custom functionality. The way we look at it is a site search experience has the natural extension to “save” a search. Then there is the natural extension to get notifications when something matches the search. So, I understand the distinction, but i think the functionality provided by percolators are relevant to site search use cases. I imagine people just handle it through brute force means typically

Yeah, it’s definitely an interesting feature. I’ve heard about this ask from one other user so far… (They didn’t call it “percolation” though).

Could you open a GitHub issue describing how this feature would work ideally, along with the use-case you described?

We can then gauge demand and see how to prioritize

Yeah, i think more broadly it is referred to as saved searches, content alerts, or on the technical side reverse searches from a functionality standpoint. Percolators is just the elasticsearch name for it. Never seen that used anywhere else