Fulltext Search on Firebase with Meilisearch

A common issue that developers face with NoSQL databases (and SQL to a lesser extent) is a lack of full-text search capabilities. If you want to build a performant typeahead search box or handle multi-property filtering on a collection, you’ll find it frustratingly difficult to implement in Firestore - it’s just not the right database for the job. There are many good solutions, like Algolia and ElasticSearch, but they can be expensive and/or complex to manage. Today we’ll look at a super-fast Rust-based open-source search engine called MeiliSearch. We’ll use it to convert a Firestore collection into a fully searchable index (great for autocomplete search), then deploy it to a VM on Google Cloud.