Lightspeed search built for devs (Changelog Interviews #649)

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We talk with Don MacKinnon, Co-founder and CTO of Searchcraft—a lightspeed search engine built in Rust. We dig into the future of search, how it blends vector embeddings with classic ranking, and what it takes to build developer-friendly, production-grade search from the ground up.

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Sponsors:

• Auth0 – The identity infrastructure for the age of AI. Built by developers, for developers—Auth0 helps you secure users, agents, and third-party access across modern AI workflows. Token vaulting, fine-grained authorization, and standards-based auth, all in one platform.
  Start building at Auth0.com/ai
• Depot – 10x faster builds? Yes please. Build faster. Waste less time. Accelerate Docker image builds, and GitHub Actions workflows. Easily integrate with your existing CI provider and dev workflows to save hours of build time.
• Outshift by Cisco – AGNTCY is an open source collective building the Internet of Agents. It’s a collaboration layer where AI agents can communicate, discover each other, and work across frameworks. For developers, this means standardized agent discovery tools, seamless protocols for inter-agent communication, and modular components to compose and scale multi-agent workflows.

Featuring:

• Don MacKinnon –
• Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
• Jerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

• Searchcraft
• Importing and searching all of Wikipedia on a Raspberry Pi

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Chapters

1. This week on The Changelog (00:00:00)

2. Sponsor: Auth0 (00:01:07)

https://auth0.com/ai

3. Start the show! (00:02:40)

4. LIVE in Denver (00:05:48)

5. Searchcraft (00:08:01)

6. Search in 2021 (00:11:41)

7. Why rust? Design decisions. (00:14:48)

8. Storage engine (00:20:03)

9. Sponsor: Depot (00:26:40)

https://depot.dev

10. Why is search cool? (00:28:49)

11. Mo' money? (00:40:17)

12. "Craft" is cool (00:43:15)

13. "All angels" funding (00:45:08)

14. Pitch decks, 5 years later (00:47:32)

15. Ethics of training data (00:57:37)

16. Sponsor: Outshift by Cisco (01:08:14)

https://agntcy.org

17. The "infringiness" of it (01:09:18)

18. What's just over the horizon? (01:25:27)

19. It's ready. You should try it. (01:30:10)

20. Cool AI images (01:30:43)

21. Closing thoughts (01:36:51)