Search Wars are here! ⚔
Forget Google, Microsoft’s Bing and others.
It’s companies like Elastic, Redis, Qdrant, Pinecone, Weaviate in the ring! 🥊
One throws a punch and takes a punch. Trying to make the most noise possible and to control the narrative.
- “You’re not AI enough, you must be AI-first!”
- “Yes, we are the best AI, most downloaded in fact!” 😅
It’s startups and VCs versus known, well-established solutions.
Investors throwing more and more money at them both.
All kinds of influencers repeating marketing claims after hearing from advocates & evangelists hired to create engagement within communities. Some just sharing what they’ve learned.
And somewhere in this picture there is a simple developer 🙂, trying to make a sense out of it.
- “I should use the one that has the most AI, right?”
- “Which one is ChatGPT-powered?”
- “Oh… vectors, because unstructured data means vectors, doesn’t it?” 😵💫 ← developer
Devs won’t be able to read all the research papers to build the state-of-the-art and the most fine-tuned solution.
Is one particular technology better than the other? Who to trust?
Search companies often don’t help. They list all the possible use cases on their websites without stating when their technology is actually better than alternatives and in which cases not really. Maybe newer doesn’t always mean better? If it comes with additional costs, it might not be worth it.
If you are such a developer, use the simplest solution from operations and cost perspectives, at least for a start. That’s my POV as a former DevOps engineer, currently working on ML solutions, studying research papers.