laravellaravel-scoutmeilisearch

Does Meilisearch have a limit for how many results it can give when searching?

I have a model, let's call it Entry.

In a view, I have a paginated table (35 per page) with a search bar that lists every entry.

When the view loads, meilisearch is called to retrieve the first page of results. This is done with a search query using the search bar's value (it starts out empty). The initial query to the search endpoint is q="", limit=35, offset=0.

When I click on the pagination buttons, meilisearch is called again, using the page number for the offset. For example, for page 2 the query should be q="", limit=35, offset=35.

This works up until page 30. Then no results are shown, even though I have more than 100 pages worth of entries in my database.

I didn't know why this happened and assumed it was something weird going on with the laravel/scout or meilisearch/meilisearch-php. After some debugging, I found nothing and decided to run the query myself using cURL.

curl \
    -H "Authorization: Bearer my-meilisearch-key" \
    -H "Content-type: application/json" \
    http://127.0.0.1:7700/indexes/my-index/search
    -d '{"q":"","limit":5,"offset":1000}'

The results are below.

Meilisearch results

Just to be clear, it I had used offset: 999, the search would have returned 1 hit. 1000 is a very peculiar number so I'm wondering if there's a configuration value somewhere that I could tweak to get as many results as I possibly can?

Solution

  • After asking around, I got the answer I needed on Discord by the user Rapand.

    As I suspected, Meilisearch did have a default 1000 results per search limit. This is configured by the maxTotalHits pagination option. To quote from their documentation :

    maxTotalHits takes priority over search parameters such as limit, offset, hitsPerPage, and page.

    For example, if you set maxTotalHits to 100, you will not be able to access search results beyond 100 no matter the value configured for offset.

    To update my pagination's limits, I just ran

    curl \
    -X PATCH 'http://localhost:7700/indexes/my-index/settings/pagination' \
    -H 'Authorization: Bearer my-meilisearch-key' \
    -H 'Content-type: application/json' \
    -d '{"maxTotalHits": 20000}'