Algolia Search

Algolia Search

Algolia is a site search & discovery API for websites and mobile apps. They help create powerful, relevant, and scalable discovery experiences for their users. More than 6,000 companies rely on Algolia to manage 50 billion search queries a month.

Algolia Search Features

• Unprecedented Search Speed – Results show up immediately as the user types and an instant search results page updates with products and categories in real-time. Instant results mean that search is a great experience, even on mobile.

• Relevance and Synonyms – Ranking options enable you to prioritize results that send customers to your best selling and most popular products. Advanced typo tolerance and synonym matching make sure you are always bringing users to exactly what they are searching for.

• Reliability – 99.99% SLA: we make sure that your search is up and running at all times. Provide the same advanced Magento search performance to all your users, no matter which part of the world they’re in by replicating your data across any of the 52 data centers in our Distributed Search Network.

• Filters and Facets – Customized filters and facets update as users search, turning your search bar into a powerful find as you type browsing tool.

• Advanced Analytics – Easy insights on what your customers are searching for and the search queries they use — in one central dashboard.

Algolia vs Elasticsearch

Usage effort:

• ElasticSearch is a “do it yourself” product: you need to know the impacts of your configuration (there are often different ways to do something, which can have a big impact on performance), you also need to take the hosting & the maintenance on your own (like upgrading the version without impacting the queries, hardware sizing, and tuning, …).

• Algolia is a turnkey product; everything is included: hosting, high-availability in 3 locations.

Relevance:

• ElasticSearch has a ranking formula that assigns one unique score to each document and mixes a lot of information (if–idf, attribute weights, the proximity between words). It is difficult to control the consequence of a change. The sweet spot of this approach is on the indexing of big records (like webpages) because TF-IDF statistics are needed on a big chunk of text.

• Algolia has a Tie-Breaking approach: Instead of assigning a matching score to each document, we sort the results like you would do naturally with your brain. We first sort on the number of typos, then in case of equality we sort on the proximity between words, then on the order of attributes. You can easily control the relevance and add your business metrics even without search expertise. The sweet spot of this approach is on small structured data (database records).

Technology:

• Algolia was first written as an offline search engine for mobile devices (indexing & search were done directly on the device, no Internet connection required). That’s why our algorithms & data structures are very specific and optimized to run on very low resources. While moving to SAAS, this C++ SDK has been embedded as an Nginx module on high-end servers (with the addition of high-availability with a built-in replication on 3 hosts).

• ElasticSearch is based on Lucene, which is a famous Java-based open-source engine.

OpenSource:

• ElasticSearch is opensource by nature. This is the way it was designed and has reached this level of notoriety.

• Algolia is a closed source. Our culture is transparency and honesty, we always like to explain in detail how our engine is working. We want to be the best in what we do and open-sourcing our software in good condition would require time (the same reasoning applies for an on-premise version) that we currently don’t have.

Algolia pricing:

Algolia has a free plan for noncommercial use.

The starter plan begins at 29$ per month.

Pro plans begin at 499$ per month.

Enterprise plans begin at 4999$ per month.

Algolia Search places

Algolia Places provides a fast, distributed, and easy way to use the address search autocomplete JavaScript library on your website. It has been designed to improve the user experience of your HTML forms.

Algolia Search Drupal

This module provides integration with the Algolia service, through Drupal’s Search API. This module is intended to be used by developers, as it does not currently provide any implementation of an actual search interface. Only indexing is currently supported. As a result, enabling that module will not have any visible effect on your application. Search functionality may be implemented using the Algolia Javascript API.

Algolia Search API

1. instant search-

   The instantsearch object is the main component of InstantSearch.js. It manages the widget and lets you add new ones.

   Two parameters are required to get you started with InstantSearch.js:

   • indexName: the main index that you need to use for your new search UI
   • searchClient: the search client to plug to InstantSearch.js

     const search = instantsearch({
       indexName: 'instant_search',
       searchClient: algoliasearch(
         'YourApplicationID',
         'YourSearchOnlyAPIKey'
       ),
     });
     
     // Add widgets
     // ...
     
     search.start();

      

Algolia Search Competitors

1. Expertrec– Expertrec’s site search solution (begins at 9 USD per month) is a great alternative to Algolia.
2. Elasticsearch–Elasticsearch is a highly scalable open-source full-text search and analytics engine. It allows you to store, search, and analyze big volumes of data quickly and in near real-time. It is generally used as the underlying engine/technology that powers applications that have complex search features and requirements. Elasticsearch provides a distributed system on top of Lucene StandardAnalyzer for indexing and automatic type guessing and utilizes a JSON based REST API to refer to Lucene features.
3. Azure search–Azure Search is a cloud search service with built-in artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities that enrich all types of information to easily identify and explore relevant content at scale. It uses the same integrated Microsoft natural language stack that Bing and Office have used for more than a decade, and prebuilt AI APIs across vision, language, and speech. 

Add Expertrec Search to your website @ $9