One trouble I could see with your approach is that you treat the information "Doc at pos i" beats "Doc at pos j" independently from i and j. Intuitively, it is not as critical when a bad doc is at rank 9 instead of rank 10; compared to bad doc landing at rank 1 instead of rank 10.
LambdaMART's approach seems better in that respect.
Our seed round was 100% made of SAFE, so VCs did not have the power to force us to do anything.
The sentence in the blog post is a tad misleading. I suspect François is not really talking about VCs that had already invested in quickwit, but about the usual flow of other VCs who contacted us, to know about the company and be part of our eventual series A.
It just generally felt like we were "at a crossing".
Thanks for the clarification, and sorry for jumping to an incorrect conclusion based on vague wording. (I would edit my comment accordingly but I can't anymore.)
Developer of tantivy chiming in! (I hope that's ok) Database performance is a space where there are a lot of lies and bullshit, so you are 100% right to be suspicious.
I don't know SeekStorm's team and I did not dig much into the details, but my impression so far is that their benchmark's results are fair. At least I see no reason not to trust them.
- it does not do vector search. It can rank docs using BM25, but usually people just want to sort by timestamp.
- its does not use an SSD cache. Quickwit reads directly into the object storage.
- it is append-only (you can't modify documents)
- it scales really well and typically shines on the 1TB .. 100PB range
- it has a Elastic search compatible API.
Exactly! Which is again one of the reasons it's confusing that people apply full text search technology to logs. Machine logs are quite a lot less entropic than human prose, and therefore can be compressed a whole lot better. A corrollary is that because of the redundancy in the data "grepping" the compressed form can be very fast, so long as the compression scheme allows it.
If the query infrastructure operating on these compressed data is itself able to store intermediate results, then we've killed two birds with one stone because we've also gotten rid of the restrictive query language. That's how cascading mapreduce jobs (or Spark) does it, allowing users to perform complex analyses that are entirely off the table if they're restricted to the lucene query language. Imagine a world where your SQL database was one giant table and only allowed you to query it with SELECT. That's pretty limiting, right?
So as a technology demonstration of Quickwit this seems really cool--it can clearly scale!--but it's kind of also an indictment of Binance (and all the other companies doing ELKish things out there).
LambdaMART's approach seems better in that respect.
https://medium.com/@nikhilbd/pointwise-vs-pairwise-vs-listwi...