One of the most important parts of building any website or web app is its search functionality. Search functionality helps to make interactions with products easier and faster. We live in a world where every millisecond counts and a bad search experience could lead to users discontinuing the use of a product.
Algolia Instant Search is a predictive search feature that tries to anticipate and guess the most likely completion of what a user’s search query is and displays information that is relevant to the user’s input instantly with every keystroke inputted in the search box. It is in a way a type of autocomplete.
Add Instant Search to your Website
How does Algolia Instant Search work?
Instant search makes a call to Algolia’s APIs on every keystroke which will return data from their servers. They serve this with widgets designed to work well with their API. While this is all well and good, setting up Algolia requires some developer bandwidth. It is designed for developers and will not feel that user-friendly if you are a site owner with limited coding expertise. While it is an okay option for larger companies, smaller entities might benefit from the next method.
Add Instant search to a website without coding
Whether you are a developer or not, adding a search to your website should be instant, much like how the search results are expected. For this, I recommend an alternative that will add a search with autocomplete and give full customization options like ranking control without any coding.
- Navigate to https://cse.expertrec.com/newuser?platform=cse and signup with your Google ID.
- Enter your website’s URL when prompted. You can select a server location near you and add the URL of your sitemap if you wish to. These will be auto-detected otherwise.
- You can play around with the settings and customize the UI as the crawl runs. Once it is complete, you can check out a fully functional demo before taking the search to your website.
- You can take the search to your website with little to no effort. All you need to do is to paste the code snippet available on the dashboard on your website.
ExpertRec comes with more customization options that you can explore. You can read this article to find a more detailed guide on the installation and configuration.
