Perplexity Introduces Photon: A Rust-Based Retrieval Engine That Cuts p99 Latency From 800 ms to 65 ms
Perplexity has released Photon, an in-house retrieval and ranking engine written in Rust. It replaces an open-source engine Perplexity had forked for its AI-native search stack. Photon now handles retrieval and ranking for all production traffic. It also powers a new Fast Search mode in the Perplexity Search API. Perplexity reports single-call latency of 160 ms at p50 and 230 ms at p95. Is it deployable? Yes, as a hosted API. Set search_type: "fast" on POST /search and pay $1 per 1,000 reque
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Perplexity has released Photon, a retrieval and ranking engine written in Rust that handles search queries for its AI search product. The engine significantly improves speed, reducing the slowest 1% of query response times from 800 milliseconds to 65 milliseconds, and requires far fewer machines to operate. Perplexity offers a faster search mode called Fast Search through its API at $1 per 1,000 requests, which costs about 68% less to run on agent tasks but returns slightly less relevant results than the default search option.
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