Elliot Sawyer

In this panel, Elliot Sawyer introduces Typesense, an open-source, typo-tolerant search engine designed from the ground-up for delivering incredibly fast and relevant search results almost instantaneously. The talk highlights Typesense’s capabilities and demonstrates how it can significantly enhance the search functionality of your website.

Elliot begins the talk with a live demonstration, which features Typesense’s search-as-you-type experience front and center on its own homepage. After going into some detail around Typesense’s history and multitude of performance benchmarks, Elliot covers the search engine’s key features, including its support for synonyms, curated search results, geospatial searches, international language support, and detailed analytics. Additionally, he discusses advanced capabilities like an attachable dashboard, federated and scoped searches, machine learning integrations, text extraction from documents, and the advantages of GPU acceleration locally or via a third-party artificial intelligence service.

The talk continues with a guided tour of the open-source Silverstripe Typesense module, which Elliot created to connect with Typesense. He will offer practical examples of how to use the CMS to create collections without writing any code, and offer further advice on how developers can integrate the software into their own projects. This talk will be followed by more demos, including a federated search hosted within the CMS itself, along with some demonstrations of applications Elliot has built using the same open-source module presented on the website.  Users will be shown a configurable pagetype that searches the content of an audiobook and tells you exactly when a phrase was spoken.  They will also see a paint-matching appllication for describing your CSS variables with Resene paint colours, as well as an automatic lookup to search across 2.2 million New Zealand addresses from an open-source dataset.

The talk concludes with a brief technical discussion on how to create Typesense collections with code and an API, as well as how to create a basic search controller and setting up an InstantSearch application.  Users will see further examples of Typesense being used “in the wild” with source code available, and provided with a number of resources where they can go to ask for hel. By the end of the talk, attendees will have a clear understanding of Typesense’s powerful search capabilities and how to integrate it into their own projects.