Morning Edition · Monday, October 19, 2026Published at 2:14 AM EDT · New York

Perplexity replaces its open-source search engine with Photon, a Rust ranking service that returns 95% of API results within 230 milliseconds

Perplexity says its new Fast Search mode cuts combined model and search cost per agent task by 68% across six benchmarks, at a measured loss in long-tail relevance.

Perplexity has described Photon, a retrieval and ranking engine written in Rust that finds and ranks web pages before a language model writes the answer. AI ML Big Data reported that the company built a new fast mode for its agent Search AP…