Search is now the bottleneck for AI agents, and Perplexity just rebuilt theirs from the ground up.

Photon is their new retrieval and ranking engine, written in Rust. It replaces the open-source engine they had forked for years.

The old engine's problem: the index outgrew RAM. Cold reads caused page faults, p99 sat near 800 ms, and index merges pushed it to ~1.2 s.

Photon's fix, in 4 moves:

1/ Compact posting lists that pick a format per block: inline, sparse arrays, or bitmaps
2/ A budgeted, WAND-like traversal that skips candidates before reading exact scores
3/ Disk reads batched through io_uring, so waits overlap instead of piling up
4/ Index builds moved off the serving nodes entirely

The result in production: p99 dropped to ~65 ms, on ~20% fewer machines, while storing ~2.5x more data per document.

For developers, Photon powers a new Fast Search mode:

→ 160 ms p50 / 230 ms p95 per call
→ $1 per 1K requests (vs $5 standard)
→ ~68% lower estimated agent task cost at comparable quality

Technical details + full breakdown in the reply 👇
Full breakdown: https://marktechpost.com/2026/09/30/perplexity-introduces-photon-a-rust-based-retrieval-engine-that-cuts-p99-latency-from-800-ms-to-65-ms/

Technical details: https://perplexity.ai/hub/blog/photon