Vespa
Shares rank 28 of 38 search engines by recommenders
Open-source search engine for hybrid vector and filtered queries, with one user reporting 40ms p99 query times on a 1.4B-vector deployment. Critics say it is more complex than it should be.
Open-source search engine for hybrid vector and filtered queries, with one user reporting 40ms p99 query times on a 1.4B-vector deployment. Critics say it is more complex than it should be.
8 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 7
- criticize it
- 1
- approval share
- 88%
Recommended in 3 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 7 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 7 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 3 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, not met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Hybrid vector search with filtering
“Hybrid search with vector similarity and filtering I think has mostly been solved by Vespa”
Comment from 11 Nov 2025 in “Scaling HNSWs” “Vespa supports filtering across parent-child relationships (like a relational database)”
Comment from 3 Nov 2025 in “The Case Against PGVector”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Everything more complex than needed
“rest of Yahoo had great code (like vespa or the graph behind Yahoo 360), but everything was more complex than it should be”
Comment from 26 Apr 2026 in “Flickr: The First and Last Great Photo Platform”
Other search engines people recommend
The four most recommended other search engines, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kagi | 732 | 234 | 76% | 13 | 2 yrs106 owners | Approved |
| Google Search | 315 | 1,039 | 23% | 12 | 20 yrs25 owners | — |
| DuckDuckGo | 286 | 204 | 58% | 12 | 3.5 yrs47 owners | — |
| Hister | 81 | 9 | 90% | 9 | 2 mo17 owners | Approved |
| VespaThis page | 7 | 1 | 88% | 3 | — | — |
What people said
All 8 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“tensors with labels are much easier to use and reason about”
“Meh. I guess people like the style.”
“rest of Yahoo had great code (like vespa or the graph behind Yahoo 360), but everything was more complex than it should be”
“do support a very large (1.4B+ vector) Vespa deployment and see 40ms p99 query times”
“Just lookup how vespa.ai does it, it's open source.”
“The thing Vespa solved was taking existing ANN methods and fixing a disk/RAM tradeoff”
“Hybrid search with vector similarity and filtering I think has mostly been solved by Vespa”
“Vespa supports filtering across parent-child relationships (like a relational database)”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.