Xapian is described as 'Open source probabilistic information retrieval library, released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It full text search engine library for programmers. It is written in C++, with bindings to allow use from Perl, Python, PHP, Java, Tcl, C#, Ruby, and' and is a Search Server in the development category. There are more than 25 alternatives to Xapian for a variety of platforms, including Linux, Web-based, Self-Hosted, Mac and Windows apps. The best Xapian alternative is Algolia. It's not free, so if you're looking for a free alternative, you could try Algolia or Elasticsearch. Other great apps like Xapian are Manticore search, Searchspring, Pagefind and Sphinx (search engine).