Perplexity Introduces Photon: A Rust-Based Retrieval Engine That Cuts p99 Latency From 800 ms to 65 ms

Perplexity has released Photon, an in-house retrieval and ranking engine written in Rust. It replaces an open-source engine Perplexity had forked for its AI-native search stack. Photon now handles retrieval and ranking for all production traffic.