Perplexity Releases Rust Search Engine Photon, Reducing p99 Latency from 800ms to 65ms

Techub News reports that AI search company Perplexity has released its in-house developed Rust-based retrieval and ranking engine, Photon, to replace its previously forked open-source engine. Photon now handles all production traffic and supports the new "Fast Search" mode in its search API. Perplexity reports that its single-call p50 latency is 160 milliseconds, and p95 latency is 230 milliseconds. Photon has reduced the p99 latency for retrieval and ranking from approximately 800 milliseconds to about 65 milliseconds, while using approximately 20% fewer service machines compared to the old content nodes. The engine is provided as a managed API, and users can access it by setting search_type: "fast" in POST /search, with a cost of $1 per 1000 requests, although the engine itself is not open source. Perplexity has also launched a "Fast Search" mode optimized for agent workflows alongside Photon. In 3554 tasks across 6 benchmarks, this mode achieved a score of 64.3% with an estimated model and search cost of $59.73, while the default preset cost $187.60, making the former about 68% cheaper.(MarkTechPost)