Comment by deepsquirrelnet

SPLADE-easy: https://github.com/dleemiller/splade-easy

I wanted a simple retrieval index to use splade sparse vectors. This just encodes and serializes documents into flatbuffers and appends them into shards. Retrieval is just parallel flat scan, optionally with reranking.

The idea is just a simple, portable index for smaller data sizes. I’m targeting high quality hybrid retrieval, for local search, RAG or deep research scenarios.

SPLADE is a really nice “in-between” for semantic and lexical search. There’s bigger and better indexes out there like Faiss or Anserini, but I just kinda wanted something basic.

I was testing it on 120k docs in a simple cli the other day and it’s still as good as any web search experience (in terms of latency) — so I think it’ll be useful.

We’re still trying to clean up the API and do a thorough once over, so I’m not sure I’d recommend trying it yet. Hopefully soon.