What people recommend, in their own words, with the receipt.
Online grocery delivery and pickup marketplace
4 things
pgvectorSoftware
Hybrid Search in Postgres with pgvector for semantic search: Our current solution which combines lexical and embedding-based retrieval in a single Postgres engine.
Instacart's hybrid search on Postgres with pgvector
tech.instacart.com ↗·2025-05-28Wrong?
PostgreSQLSoftware
Postgres is tremendously powerful and we saw no reason to move away from it, especially with horizontally-scaling options like Aurora available.
Instacart on staying with Postgres while scaling its fulfillment data
tech.instacart.com ↗·2018-08-14Wrong?
PostgreSQLSoftware
In the case of Postgres, by pushing the availability information and other data sources into the database and using a normalized data model, we were able to consolidate all the network calls and avoided the need to overfetch and filter the results.
How Instacart moved search from Elasticsearch to Postgres
tech.instacart.com ↗·2025-05-28Wrong?
FAISSSoftware
introducing semantic retrieval in FAISS boosted search quality
Instacart's first semantic retrieval ran on FAISS before moving to pgvector (undated page)
ElasticsearchSoftware
In our case, our Elasticsearch implementation did not scale well due to our denormalized data model and the nature of our write workloads.
How Instacart moved search from Elasticsearch to Postgres
tech.instacart.com ↗·2025-05-28Wrong?
Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.
The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.
A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.
The small bar beside a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.
The bar shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Full and green is recent. It drains, and turns amber and then grey, as the post gets older.
What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The bar is empty after about:
A striped bar means the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no bar.