The world of search engines is big – a lot of different terms exist, what makes it really hard to understand what is going on. Beside the widely used Elasticsearch, nowadays there are lots of alternatives like Meilisearch, Algolia, Redisearch, Loupe and others.

Here I will introduce SEAL the Search Engine Abstraction Layer. What flysystem is for file storages and doctrine DBAL for databases, SEAL is for search engines. SEAL will give you a generic interface to communicate with different search engines.

In this talk I will give an introduction to the search topic and what I found out in my research about search engines, how SEAL the Search Engine Abstraction Layer for PHP was born and which search engines are supported. Can we demystify the technical search engine jargon into an understandable friendly configuration for everybody? Finally, we will take a closer look at the Symfony integration via the great extendable Symfony dependency injection container.