Why Danswer - the biggest open source project in Enterprise Search - uses Vespa

DanswerAI, co-founded by Yuhong Sun, transitioned to using Vespa, an open-source enterprise search engine, to enhance its search capabilities by integrating disparate knowledge sources into a unified search/chat interface with generative AI. The decision to migrate was driven by the need for improved search functionality and performance as they scaled to enterprise-level data, which their previous vector database couldn't sufficiently handle. Vespa's advanced features, such as custom boost and decay functions, multipass indexing, and support for multiple vector embeddings per document, addressed Danswer's challenges related to document ranking and indexing efficiency. This transition allowed Danswer to optimize resources and maintain high-quality search results, even with limited server capabilities. Despite the complexity involved in deploying Vespa, the team appreciated its cutting-edge NLP capabilities and permissive licensing, ultimately deciding to migrate to Vespa Cloud for managed services.