Lightspeed search built for devs (Changelog Interviews #649)
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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Chapters
- 0:00 This week on The Changelog
- 1:07 Sponsor: Auth0
- 2:40 Start the show!
- 5:48 LIVE in Denver
- 8:01 Searchcraft
- 11:41 Search in 2021
- 14:48 Why rust? Design decisions.
- 20:03 Storage engine
- 26:40 Sponsor: Depot
- 28:49 Why is search cool?
- 40:17 Mo' money?
- 43:15 "Craft" is cool
- 45:08 "All angels" funding
- 47:32 Pitch decks, 5 years later
- 57:37 Ethics of training data
- 1:08:14 Sponsor: Outshift by Cisco
- 1:09:18 The "infringiness" of it
- 1:25:27 What's just over the horizon?
- 1:30:10 It's ready. You should try it.
- 1:30:43 Cool AI images
- 1:36:51 Closing thoughts
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This episode is 1 hour and 38 minutes long.
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This episode was published on July 10, 2025.
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