Can we do an audit before committing to Vespa?

Yes. Most teams start with an audit. The audit evaluates architecture fit, migration complexity, and expected benefits before any full commitment to Vespa. It produces a migration roadmap and clear next steps.

How long does the audit take?

Typically 3–5 weeks depending on system complexity. The audit produces a migration roadmap, ROI estimate, and a recommended deployment model.

How do we know if migration is actually worth it?

That's exactly what the audit determines. We evaluate the current system's architecture, query patterns, ranking logic, and operational costs. The outcome is a clear recommendation: migrate, improve the existing system, or defer.

Can we migrate without downtime?

Yes. We run Vespa in parallel with the existing system and shift traffic incrementally. Full rollback capability is maintained at every stage. Cutover happens only once metrics are stable.

Can Vespa run alongside our existing search system?

Yes. Most migrations start with Vespa running in parallel with the existing system. Teams validate quality and performance before shifting traffic incrementally.

Do we need to migrate everything at once?

No. Most migrations start with one use case — typically product search or a core retrieval workload. Teams validate relevance, performance, and operational behavior before expanding Vespa to other use cases.

Is Vespa difficult to operate?

There is a learning curve — Vespa has different terminology and operational patterns. Most teams start with Vespa Cloud, which removes infrastructure management and lets engineers focus on building ranking logic and search applications.

Do real-time updates require refresh operations?

No. Vespa's mutable data structures make updates immediately visible. Stock, pricing, or freshness changes affect ranking as soon as they are written — no refresh operations required.

Do you work with teams that don't have in-house search engineers?

Yes. Many teams bring Searchplex in because they lack in-house search expertise. We work alongside your engineers, transfer knowledge, and can support production operations beyond the initial migration.

◆Official Vespa.ai Partner

Search modernisation & migration

Search infrastructure has changed.
Your stack hasn't.

Traditional search architectures struggle with hybrid retrieval, real-time updates, and ML-driven ranking at scale.

Migration is one of three paths that typically follow a Search Stack Audit. Some teams improve their existing stack, others migrate to a stronger retrieval foundation like Vespa, and some pursue a focused AI-native build.

Searchplex migrates production search systems from Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr, and SaaS vendors to Vespa. In production. At scale. Without disruption.

See the migration service →

50×

Latency improvement · Splore AI

Production migrations shipped

2023

Delivering Vespa in production since

Migration is search modernisationAudit-first, alwaysQuality parity before performanceOne system, not stitched layersZero-downtime parallel rollout

01 — Recognize the moment

When migration becomes worth considering

A setup that worked well for keyword search starts to show strain when the system has to support larger-scale vector retrieval, hybrid search, frequent updates, advanced ranking logic, or separate recommendation flows.

Hybrid retrieval becomes hard to operate

Hybrid retrieval is technically possible but becomes harder to operate predictably at scale. Resource and latency spikes trace back to segment merges, not traffic.

Ranking requires external services

Reranking requires an external service. Results leave your search engine, get reranked by a separate model, and come back — two more components to manage and two fewer signals to use.

Real-time signals are hard to incorporate

Stock levels, pricing, and freshness are hard to incorporate cleanly. Changes that should affect ranking immediately don't — because near real-time is not real-time.

Search and recommendations diverge

Search and recommendation have evolved into separate systems with duplicated logic, separate operational burdens, and no shared signals between them.

Experiment velocity slows

New relevance experiments take too long to ship. The model is ready in days; getting it into production ranking takes weeks because of what surrounds the engine.

Team spends more time on ops

Your team spends more time managing search complexity than improving search quality. Operations have become the job.

Migration becomes worth considering when your current system is no longer helping you move faster.Not because it failed. Because it became the constraint.

02 — Why Vespa

A different architectural approach

Most search stacks bolt retrieval, ranking, and ML together as separate systems. Vespa runs them in one serving layer, keeping ranking logic, signals, and models close to the data.

Native capability

Multi-phase ranking without external services

Many production stacks rerank results using an external service. Top-k results leave the search engine, get rescored by a model, and come back. That adds infrastructure, latency, and operational drag. Vespa runs multi-phase ranking natively — keeping ranking logic close to retrieval.

Architecture advantage

True real-time updates

For use cases where stock, pricing, freshness, or other attributes must affect results immediately, Vespa's mutable data structures make updates visible without refresh operations. That is genuinely real-time — not near real-time with a propagation delay baked in.

System consolidation

One engine for search and personalisation

In many stacks, search and recommendation evolve into separate systems with separate operational costs. Vespa supports both in the same engine, using shared data and shared ranking infrastructure. Fewer systems. Shared signals. One team working in one direction.

Iteration speed

Run ranking experiments without infrastructure work

Vespa supports configurable ranking profiles and native model hosting, making it straightforward to test lexical, semantic, and hybrid ranking strategies. The model work stays model work — not infrastructure work.

03 — Migration paths

Every stack has a path forward

We've migrated from every major production search infrastructure. The pattern is always the same: audit first, quality parity second, performance third, parallel rollout throughout.

Current stackWhy teams migrate

Lucene-based search stacks (Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr)

Segment merge cost at scale; external reranking sprawl; hybrid search brittleness; near-real-time indexing limitations.

SaaS search platforms (Algolia, Bloomreach, Coveo)

Vendor lock-in; black-box ranking; license cost vs capability ceiling.

Multi-system AI stack (lexical search + vector DB/search + recsys services)

Three infrastructures, glue code, duplicated signals, and avoidable operational complexity.

Want to understand the architectural differences in more detail?

Watch our webinar on migrating from Elasticsearch to Vespa

04 — A safe migration program

What a low-risk migration program looks like

Executives do not need full delivery mechanics first. They need a credible model for how migration risk gets reduced before production traffic moves.

Assess the constraint

Understand where the current stack is slowing product, relevance, or operational progress.

Map the current architecture, identify the bottlenecks that matter, and determine whether migration is justified now, later, or not at all.

Start with Audit

Validate the target state

Prove that Vespa can meet the quality, ranking, and operational requirements before committing to full rollout.

Use representative data, realistic queries, and clear success criteria to establish confidence in the new architecture before the organization takes migration risk.

Roll out without disruption

Migrate only when quality, performance, and rollback plans are established.

A production migration is a controlled program, not a leap of faith. Traffic moves gradually, metrics stay visible, and rollback remains available until the new system is proven.

Start with an Audit Need the delivery details? See the migration service →

05 — Results

Migrations we've shipped

All delivered without disruption to the businesses that depend on them.

See all case studies →

Finance Technology · Singapore · Elasticsearch → Vespa

Splore AI: Production search at petabyte scale

Splore AI's Elasticsearch infrastructure couldn't support their data volume, hybrid search requirements, or ML ranking ambitions. We migrated to Vespa, rebuilt the ranking pipeline natively inside the engine, and delivered sub-second results across petabyte-scale indices — without an external reranking service.

50×

Latency improvement

~20ms

Query response time

Native

ML ranking, no external service

Legal Technology · Belgium · Vector DB → Vespa

CuratedAI: Multilingual legal search

CuratedAI needed hybrid search across EU legislation and case law in English, French, and Dutch — with no official translations for many documents. We migrated from their vector database to Vespa, implementing multi-vector indexing and multilingual embeddings in a single engine.

3 langs

Unified retrieval

Hybrid

Lexical + semantic

1 engine

Multi-vector Vespa

Official Partner

“Excited about this partnership. Many of the customers we speak to are held back by not having the development capacity in-house to build the solutions they want on Vespa. Searchplex can help with that.”

Jon Bratseth · CEO of Vespa.ai

View original post →

06 — Common questions

Common questions

The questions leadership teams usually ask before deciding whether migration should be evaluated.

07 — Why start here

Why the audit is the right first step

The first decision is not whether to migrate immediately. It is whether the architecture deserves a structured evaluation.

Executive clarity before engineering effort

An audit gives leadership a grounded answer on whether migration should happen now, what risk exists, and what the likely return looks like.

A realistic roadmap instead of a platform opinion

The output is not just 'Vespa is better.' It is a phased recommendation tied to your stack, your data, and your operational constraints.

A lower-risk starting point

Teams can make the right decision without committing to a full migration engagement on day one.

Already decided?

See the migration delivery engagement.

If the decision to migrate is already made, go directly to the service page for scope, process, benchmarking, rollout, and post-launch support.

View Vespa Migration Service

08 — Start here

The lowest-risk way to find out where you stand

You don't need to commit to a migration to get a clear picture of whether one makes sense — or what it would cost to stay on your current stack.

Migration Readiness Audit

✓

Architecture review and dependency mapping

✓

Migration roadmap: phased, realistic, risk-adjusted

✓

ROI estimate — cost of migration vs cost of staying

✓

Deployment model recommendation (Cloud vs self-hosted)

✓

Executive-ready report with prioritized findings

3-5 weeks · Fixed price · Credited toward migration if you proceed

View audit details →

Search infrastructure has changed.Your stack hasn't.