Migrating to the Vespa Search Engine

Satoshi Takatori describes Stanby's migration from multiple search engines to a unified system using Vespa, aiming to address various challenges with their existing setup. Stanby, a major Japanese job search engine, faced issues with its current systems: Solr-based ABYSS for organic search and Elasticsearch for advertisement search, including risks of service unavailability, development constraints, and scaling difficulties. By choosing Vespa, an open-source big data serving engine known for its real-time, low-latency, and high-throughput capabilities, Stanby aims to consolidate resources, improve search accuracy, and enhance operational independence. The migration process involved thorough investigation, functional verification using Vespa's Docker image, and a multi-node Vespa cluster setup on AWS for high availability. While the organic search migration is complete, the advertisement search is underway, with future plans to leverage Vespa's capabilities in vector search and auto-scaling, despite challenges such as language processing and the need for custom solutions in Japanese.