Overcommitted Ep. 29 | Building Search Infrastructure Developers Actually Want to Use with Don MacKinnon
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Oct 14, 2025 Don MacKinnon, founder of Searchcraft and former CTO, shares his insightful journey in building developer-friendly search infrastructure. He discusses the benefits of using Rust for efficiency and simplicity, while detailing the two-year development challenge before launching. Don emphasizes making search accessible for non-technical users through a GUI and the pivotal role of AI in enhancing relevancy. He also reflects on the competitive search tool landscape and the importance of identifying real user pain points in product development.
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Rust Cuts Complexity And Boosts Relevance
- Don MacKinnon chose Rust to reduce resource usage and operational complexity for search infrastructure.
- Rust enabled runtime performance gains and query-time features that improved result relevance.
Two Years Of Internal Bootstrapping
- Don and his team built the core engine over two years while consulting and using it internally.
- They shipped the core engine about a year and a half before spinning it into a product company.
Make Relevancy Tunable For Non-Engineers
- Searchcraft makes search relevancy tunable via a GUI so non-developers can adjust weights, synonyms, and languages.
- This reduces developer handoffs and empowers product managers to manage search behavior directly.