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This guide shows you how to set up a Meilisearch REST embedder with Hugging Face Inference Endpoints for semantic search.
You can use Hugging Face and Meilisearch in two ways: running the model locally by setting the embedder source to huggingFace, or remotely on Hugging Face’s servers by setting the embedder source to rest.
Hugging Face hosts hundreds of sentence embedding models. Some popular choices:
ModelDimensionsNotes
BAAI/bge-small-en-v1.5384Fast, English-only, great for most use cases
BAAI/bge-large-en-v1.51,024Higher quality English embeddings
BAAI/bge-multilingual-gemma2variesMultilingual, based on Gemma 2
sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2384Lightweight and fast
sentence-transformers/all-mpnet-base-v2768Higher quality general-purpose
sentence-transformers/paraphrase-multilingual-MiniLM-L12-v2384Multilingual, lightweight
intfloat/multilingual-e5-large1,024Strong multilingual performance
Browse the full catalog of available models on the Hugging Face Inference Endpoints catalog.

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Requirements

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Configure the embedder

Set up an embedder using the update settings endpoint: 
{
  "hf-inference": {
    "source": "rest",
    "url": "ENDPOINT_URL",
    "apiKey": "API_KEY",
    "dimensions": 384,
    "documentTemplate": "CUSTOM_LIQUID_TEMPLATE",
    "request": {
      "inputs": ["{{text}}", "{{..}}"],
      "model": "baai/bge-small-en-v1.5"
    },
    "response": ["{{embedding}}", "{{..}}"]
  }
}
In this configuration:
  • source: declares Meilisearch should connect to this embedder via its REST API
  • url: replace ENDPOINT_URL with the address of your Hugging Face model endpoint
  • apiKey: replace API_KEY with your Hugging Face API key
  • dimensions: specifies the dimensions of the embeddings, which are 384 for baai/bge-small-en-v1.5
  • documentTemplate: an optional but recommended template for the data you will send the embedder
  • request: defines the structure and parameters of the request Meilisearch will send to the embedder
  • response: defines the structure of the embedder’s response
Once you’ve configured the embedder, Meilisearch will automatically generate embeddings for your documents. Monitor the task using the Cloud UI or the list tasks endpoint.
This example uses BAAI/bge-small-en-v1.5 as its model. See the popular models section above for alternatives, or browse the full Inference Endpoints catalog.
With the embedder set up, you can now perform semantic searches. Make a search request with the hybrid search parameter, setting semanticRatio to 1: 
{
  "q": "QUERY_TERMS",
  "hybrid": {
    "semanticRatio": 1,
    "embedder": "hf-inference"
  }
}
In this request:
  • q: the search query
  • hybrid: enables AI-powered search functionality
    • semanticRatio: controls the balance between semantic search and full-text search. Setting it to 1 means you will only receive semantic search results
    • embedder: the name of the embedder used for generating embeddings

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Conclusion

You have set up with an embedder using Hugging Face Inference Endpoints. This allows you to use pure semantic search capabilities in your application. Consult the embedder setting documentation for more information on other embedder configuration options.