How Instacart Built a Modern Search Infrastructure on Postgres

240 · Instacart · May 28, 2025, 7:33 p.m.
Summary
This blog post details Instacart's journey of evolving its search infrastructure by migrating from Elasticsearch to Postgres and implementing a hybrid search system combining traditional and embedding-based retrieval methods. It discusses the challenges faced with their previous solutions and showcases how the new architecture has improved search relevance, operational efficiency, and customer experience.