Taylor Otwell moves Laravel’s docs search to turbopuffer, built in about an hour

Taylor Otwell, who created Laravel, says he’s moved the laravel.com documentation search pipeline onto turbopuffer, a search engine built on object storage, and shipped it internally in about an hour, according to his post on X.

Otwell posted at 5:18pm UTC on 14 November (6:18am on 15 November NZ time). He says Laravel has been rebuilding laravel.com “for everything we’re shipping in just a few weeks”, and that he wanted to replace the older, hosted documentation search ingestion pipeline with a new custom setup powered by turbopuffer. Ingestion is the step that reads the docs pages and loads them into the search index.

We’ve been doing a lot of work preparing (and totally rebuilding) laravel.com for everything we’re shipping in just a few weeks. ✨ I wanted to move our older, hosted documentation search ingestion pipeline to a totally new custom setup powered by @turbopuffer. Cooked and shipped the whole thing (internally) in about an hour with a full eval suite comparing the relevance of the old results to the new results across hundreds of common queries. I love this era.

— Taylor Otwell (@taylorotwell) November 14, 2026

What he checked

Otwell says the work included a full eval suite that compared the relevance of the old results with the new ones across hundreds of common queries. An eval suite, here, is a set of test searches run against both systems so the two sets of results can be compared side by side.

What turbopuffer is

turbopuffer describes itself as a fast, object-storage native search engine. It keeps its data in object storage such as S3 and uses SSD and memory caches for queries, and it supports full-text, vector and hybrid search. Its own docs list the trade-offs: writes are slower because they go straight to object storage (a p90 of 248 ms for 512 KB upserts), and queries on uncached data are slower too (a p90 of 1,214 ms on 1 million documents).

The service is commercial only, with no free tier. Its pricing changelog shows the Launch plan minimum dropped from US$64 to US$16 a month in June 2026.

Laravel already has a turbopuffer engine

Laravel Scout, the package that keeps search indexes in sync with a Laravel app’s database records, added a turbopuffer engine in v11.6.0 on 25 August 2026. Otwell wrote the pull request. On 31 August he announced semantic and hybrid search for Scout across three drivers: the database (using pgvector), Meilisearch and turbopuffer.

Laravel’s search documentation says most applications are covered by the built-in database options, and that external search services are only necessary for features such as faceted filtering or geo-search at massive scale.

Otwell’s post doesn’t name the hosted service the docs search used before, publish the eval results, or say what Laravel is shipping in the next few weeks.