The issue with Algolia is that they have insane technology but it is mostly used only to search documentation.
They are struggling to sell their techno to people who need them deeply, for a lot of reasons. But one of them is that they are a tricky choice. It is not a database technology, so not a developer choice but also their technology is only useful to developers.
As a result they have to try to sell their product when you need a search but no developers are working on it. That's how you end up powering external and internal documentation portals. That's really a waste of resource
I disagree. I'm a early Algolia adopter(and an engineer) and as an engineer they are a no-brainer for me.
Search is really hard even with the best elasticsearch libraries. IMO the biggest blocker with algolia is the price. It's really hard to get company buy-in because leadership don't get it: "Just build it"
> But one of them is that they are a tricky choice.
How so? (What you follow that statement with doesn't seem to explain it.)
When I took a close look at Algolia for a project it seemed straightforward as a choice, but the cost would've been completely out-of-wack in comparison to what I was spending for the rest of the tech stack. This aligns with what a contributor to Typesense mentions in the comments, which is that what they hear from many potential Algolia customers is that it's "a great product but can get quite expensive at even moderate scale".
> The issue with Algolia is that they have insane technology but it is mostly used only to search documentation.
This is a really interesting side-effect of what Algolia was probably trying to do: use documentation search to spread brand awareness, but then ironically, because of their (successful IMO) strategy, the product is being perceived as mostly being used primarily for documentation search.
I work on an open source alternative to Algolia called Typesense.
Algolia is a great product but can get quite expensive at even moderate scale. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard this from Algolia users switching over…
Looks pretty interesting. There never really seemed to be any good alternatives to ES for a long time. Apart from building feature set, how do you target quality of search results? Do you have any test bed for measuring this and do you benchmark against other solutions to try and understand how everyone fares?
It's easy to use and setup. If pricing and closed source is OK with you then it's worth it. We've used them few years ago and then switched to ES. Think of it like of pre-docker Heroku.
Using them for a side project. Very impressed with their developer experience. Their React instant-search plugin is great, and very easy to add. Their documentation is great. Their admin UI is great.
Really happy with the service it provides and the ease of implementation. Note that because the docs can take a few seconds to load, the their crawler times out and misses some content some of the time. With better page performance this should not be an issue.
(We are actively working on some cool ideas to make Lowdefy apps super fast)
Big up-front disclaimer: my job is making software at Loop54 and my salary comes from happy customers of our service.
One of our goals is similar to yours: browsing an online store should be like walking around in a physical store. The navigation system on the site should be as adept as a knowledgeable store employee in helping you find exactly what you're looking for.
At Loop54 many of our customers come from Algolia. It's very popular, and nobody ever gets fired for buying Algolia. In that sense, it's a safe option.
On the other hand, customers come to us from Algolia because Algolia requires a bit of hand-holding and it still doesn't quite seem to get what users are really looking for. When our prospects run randomised controlled trials, our search consistently seems to give users what they want better than Algolia does, with less effort. I can ask about specific numbers if you want.
However, another strength of Algolia that Loop54 is currently behind in is in the surrounding tooling. For better or worse, with Algolia, you'll have more knobs and levers to play with (and you'll need them much more often!)
We do have one or two customers that have a majority of books in their product catalogues, and we know there are some unique challenges that come with that domain.
Loop54 is a very competent, but smaller player. If you think it's interesting, it's worth talking to us. I can't evaluate how good a fit your site would be for us, but that's why we have people who do that for a living!
Edit: I should also say that yes, Loop54 is even more expensive. You shouldn't blindly trust us (or any other provider.) I would strongly suggest running a randomised controlled trial to see whether any expense at all is worth it in your case.
I say this in part because I'm a man of science and believe in experiments to measure things, but also out of self-interest; anyone can throw out impressive marketing, but our search truly shines when put to the test against the alternatives.
I am sorry but https://www.loop54.com/pricing is just totally snied. No monetary information whatsoever. Why even blag me to a pricing page with less than zero pricing honesty.
It's strange, I don't really like using the HN Algolia search. I think it's because the responsiveness doesn't fit HN and the results are okay but not great? What are some other big sites that use Algolia as their search backend? It would be interesting to compare.
The problem with HN Algolia search is that they never updated it after comment scores were hidden. The default is to sort comments by score, but all recent comments are ranked last because their score is just assumed to be 1 or something like that.
I also wish it searched both stories and comments by default. I guess you can set your own defaults but meh, I use many different computers and don't change defaults as a general rule because it's a hassle to keep all the computers in sync.
The comfort that they provide is trap sometimes! Algolia suggests that frontend sends the queries directly to its service instead of going through our backend, which is good if you want to have a good search engine fast. But don't go for it without considering the consequences. It will take over part of the frontend and your product will depend on Algolia to the point that implementing a single favourite functionality for your users may need to integrated with their service if you're not careful!
This is false. Just because the page content isn't sensitive, that doesn't mean that TLS is worthless.
TLS prevents your run of the mill MITM scenarios. Like ISPs inserting ads (something Comcast actually did), or public wifi doing the same. Or worse, more malicious scripts.
You could argue that all I'm really looking for in most cases is message integrity (signing), but if you're going to do that, you might as well just encrypt it too and avoid accidents where sensitive information is sent over encrypted channels.
Every visited HTTP website is a network vulnerability.
It doesn't matter what is supposed to be on these sites. From security perspective they contain MITM attacker's content. They are effectively an API for issuing arbitrary commands to the browser. To shut down this attack API, all sites have to stop using HTTP, no exceptions.
Even if you disagree (and I do as well), downvotes are the wrong way to signal disagreement. Either invest in posting a response or move past it- there's no need to hide the comment from others. We're better than that, or at least we should be.
idk this seems more an evolution of clustering, when I think about search engines I think more at the progression toward stemming, lemming, synonym matching and context matching.
in memory search works well as long as you dont care about persisting your data.. for most companies that would like a big chunk of their strategic assets
Readit News
They are struggling to sell their techno to people who need them deeply, for a lot of reasons. But one of them is that they are a tricky choice. It is not a database technology, so not a developer choice but also their technology is only useful to developers.
As a result they have to try to sell their product when you need a search but no developers are working on it. That's how you end up powering external and internal documentation portals. That's really a waste of resource
Search is really hard even with the best elasticsearch libraries. IMO the biggest blocker with algolia is the price. It's really hard to get company buy-in because leadership don't get it: "Just build it"
It feels tailored to first party use.
How so? (What you follow that statement with doesn't seem to explain it.)
When I took a close look at Algolia for a project it seemed straightforward as a choice, but the cost would've been completely out-of-wack in comparison to what I was spending for the rest of the tech stack. This aligns with what a contributor to Typesense mentions in the comments, which is that what they hear from many potential Algolia customers is that it's "a great product but can get quite expensive at even moderate scale".
This is a really interesting side-effect of what Algolia was probably trying to do: use documentation search to spread brand awareness, but then ironically, because of their (successful IMO) strategy, the product is being perceived as mostly being used primarily for documentation search.
Is anyone else using them? What are your impressions so far?
Much appreciated
Algolia is a great product but can get quite expensive at even moderate scale. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard this from Algolia users switching over…
I recently put together this comparison page, comparing a few search engines, including Algolia, you might find interesting: https://typesense.org/typesense-vs-algolia-vs-elasticsearch-...
> Exact Keyword Search ("query")
Any plans on adding it in future?
worth giving a look
https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliSearch
Really happy with the service it provides and the ease of implementation. Note that because the docs can take a few seconds to load, the their crawler times out and misses some content some of the time. With better page performance this should not be an issue.
(We are actively working on some cool ideas to make Lowdefy apps super fast)
One of our goals is similar to yours: browsing an online store should be like walking around in a physical store. The navigation system on the site should be as adept as a knowledgeable store employee in helping you find exactly what you're looking for.
At Loop54 many of our customers come from Algolia. It's very popular, and nobody ever gets fired for buying Algolia. In that sense, it's a safe option.
On the other hand, customers come to us from Algolia because Algolia requires a bit of hand-holding and it still doesn't quite seem to get what users are really looking for. When our prospects run randomised controlled trials, our search consistently seems to give users what they want better than Algolia does, with less effort. I can ask about specific numbers if you want.
However, another strength of Algolia that Loop54 is currently behind in is in the surrounding tooling. For better or worse, with Algolia, you'll have more knobs and levers to play with (and you'll need them much more often!)
We do have one or two customers that have a majority of books in their product catalogues, and we know there are some unique challenges that come with that domain.
Loop54 is a very competent, but smaller player. If you think it's interesting, it's worth talking to us. I can't evaluate how good a fit your site would be for us, but that's why we have people who do that for a living!
Edit: I should also say that yes, Loop54 is even more expensive. You shouldn't blindly trust us (or any other provider.) I would strongly suggest running a randomised controlled trial to see whether any expense at all is worth it in your case.
I say this in part because I'm a man of science and believe in experiments to measure things, but also out of self-interest; anyone can throw out impressive marketing, but our search truly shines when put to the test against the alternatives.
I also wish it searched both stories and comments by default. I guess you can set your own defaults but meh, I use many different computers and don't change defaults as a general rule because it's a hassle to keep all the computers in sync.
What results do you expect more than keywords search ranked by upvote on HN? I find it great honestly, it's fast and don't do magics
TLS prevents your run of the mill MITM scenarios. Like ISPs inserting ads (something Comcast actually did), or public wifi doing the same. Or worse, more malicious scripts.
You could argue that all I'm really looking for in most cases is message integrity (signing), but if you're going to do that, you might as well just encrypt it too and avoid accidents where sensitive information is sent over encrypted channels.
It doesn't matter what is supposed to be on these sites. From security perspective they contain MITM attacker's content. They are effectively an API for issuing arbitrary commands to the browser. To shut down this attack API, all sites have to stop using HTTP, no exceptions.
Not saying you’re wrong, but it’s just a different audience that would be interested in the actual search algorithms.