Internal Search Engine

[lhorus]

Currently we can only rely on using Algolia as our search engine. Are there plans to create an internal search engine? For simpler searches and filters by category, search by name, etc.
For many cases, Algolia feels an overkill, hard to customise and quickly becomes expensive.

[radoslaw-sz]

hi @lhorus - just for curiosity, what do you mean by internal search engine? Generaly in Medusa you can implement the search engine by yourself, it is just another module. Algolia is indeed very rich, but I guess the question is about alternatives on the market, not about something which Medusa would do. I can imaging that simple search engine can be implemented very fast (in a week or two), but the question is about functionalities which you would expect vs cost.

[lhorus]

@radoslaw-sz essentially having a default search engine without having to rely on Algolia for example. To me, the basic functionalities of a search engine (filter by category, product / variant) are a critical component of an eCommerce platform, feels like it would be something every store would have to implement from scratch at the moment.

[radoslaw-sz]

I think the reason is that everyeone needs something different. For instance you mentioned filtering by the category, product and variant which is not the searching itself, but filtering mechanism. It sounds like you need a search from admin perspective, nto from user perspective. For instance from user perspective people expect to put "Autoum" (typo intentional) and get the Autumn category which normal search mechanism cannot handle well. For admin perspective you actually expect the REST API which will expect exact values which you can programtically pass.
As usual - it depends on your needs, there is no such thing like "basic searching" because basic means different things for different people.