Neos Conference 2026Loupe - a Search Engine for PHP and SQLite

Why would anyone be crazy enough to implement full-text search in PHP? This talk is the story of that “stupid idea” - and how it turned into Loupe.

I’ll start with the real-world problem that sparked the project: when existing search solutions felt too heavy or too expensive for my use case. From there, we’ll walk through the decision to build a search engine from scratch - what went wrong, what worked, and what I’ve learnt along the way.

Step by step, I’ll show how Loupe was built incrementally: from a tiny index, to fast queries, to surprisingly powerful features. We’ll dive into the heart of typo-tolerant search and unpack the algorithmic tricks that make it very fast, even on large datasets.

Whether you love search, PHP, algorithms - or bad ideas that somehow work - this talk is for you.