Comment by jabo

6 days ago

We generally tend to engage in in-depth conversations with our users.

But in this case, when you opened the GitHub issue, we noticed that you’re part of the Meilisearch team, so we didn’t want to spend too much time explaining something in-depth to someone who was just doing competitive research, when we could have instead spent that time helping other Typesense users. Which is why the response to you might have seemed brief.

For what it’s worth, the approach used in Typesense is called Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF) and it’s a well researched topic that has a bunch of academic papers published on it. So it’s best to read those papers to understand the tradeoffs involved.

> But in this case, when you opened the GitHub issue, we noticed that you’re part of the Meilisearch team, so we didn’t want to spend too much time explaining something in-depth to someone who was just doing competitive research, when we could have instead spent that time helping other Typesense users. Which is why the response to you might have seemed brief.

Well, in this case I was just trying to be a normal user that want the best relevancy possible and couldn’t find a solution. But the reason why I couldn’t find it was not because you didn’t want to spend more time on my case, it was because typesense provide no solution to this problem.

> it’s a well researched topic that has a bunch of academic papers published on it. So it’s best to read those papers to understand the tradeoffs involved.

Yeah, cool or in other word « it’s bad, we know it and we can’t help you, but it’s the state of the art, you should instruct yourself ». But guess what, meilisearch may need some fine-tuning around your model etc, but in the end it gives you the tool to make a proper hybrid search that knows the quality of the results before mixing them.

If other people want to see the original issue: https://github.com/typesense/typesense/issues/1964

  • I think this is a good example of why people should disclose their background when commenting on competing products/projects. Even if the intentions were sound, which seems to be the case here, upfront disclosure would have given the conversation more weight and meaning.