Perplexity has rolled out Photon, a retrieval and ranking engine it built in Rust. The engine replaces a forked open‑source component and now handles all of Perplexity’s production search traffic. Photon also powers a new Fast Search mode in the Perplexity Search API, giving developers quicker answers. The company says the p99 latency – the time 99% of requests take – fell from about 800 ms to 65 ms.
Why it matters
Faster search responses make AI‑driven answers feel more immediate for users and can lower cloud costs for developers.
