Perplexity Launches Photon, a Rust-Built Retrieval Engine That Slashes Search Latency by 92%
Perplexity has released Photon, an in-house retrieval and ranking engine written in Rust, replacing a forked open-source engine. The company reports that production p99 latency dropped from roughly 800 ms to 65 ms. Photon now handles all production search traffic and powers a new Fast Search mode in the Perplexity Search API, priced at $1 per 1,000 requests.