Vespa was actually very cool at the time as a document-oriented search engine, occupying the same niche as Solr and elaborations of that like ElasticSearch. But I don't know if it's competitive today.
This blog post says it's "developed by Yahoo" which is I guess true. But it was originally an acquisition, largely developed by a team in Norway, and apparently most Vespa development still happens there.
very, it's outcompeting most vector databases on features and maturity when it comes to vector search while having very powerful and flexible and proven text search too
The tricky part is, it's more a platform to build complex search systems with then "just" a vector database. So if a found a company today which focus is to create clever multi phase search pipelines and train (e.g. domain adopt) LLMs for calculating embeddings etc. then it's probably _the_ best solution by far, you probably can get away with having only AI engines devops and a single programmer (who might also most times just do devops). But if you need to deeply integrate it into a different existing search system things are less grate.
And I would love to see some modernization, like having a format for structured queries which is more widely supported then YQL... (eying graphql here)
Yeah +1 for VERY competitive. The vector capabilities of Vespa are incredible and the Text/ranking features are amazing. I don´t think any other product have those two sides so developed as them.
We conducted benchmark tests on Elastic's queries per second (QPS) performance using datasets of 500,000 and 1 million vectors. Result was Zilliz is 13x and 22x faster, per number of vectors respectively. https://zilliz.com/blog/elasticsearch-cloud-vs-zilliz
Feel free to explore our open-source benchmarking tool, which allows you to examine our methodology and even compare it with your vector database. https://github.com/zilliztech/VectorDBBench
Actually, Vespa comes out of the same FAST company. Yahoo bought Overture/Altavista and a lot of other web search companies in 2003, including the web search division of FAST. The Enterprise search division of FAST was later acquired by Microsoft.
This blog post says it's "developed by Yahoo" which is I guess true. But it was originally an acquisition, largely developed by a team in Norway, and apparently most Vespa development still happens there.