Searching for that special search platform? You've found it with Algolia.
December 15, 2017
Searching for that special search platform? You've found it with Algolia.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Algolia
Algolia is our go-to solution for searches on our iOS app, as well as our upcoming web app. We use it to allow users to search for other users as well as pre-defined location filters that we've created. Additionally, we use it in almost all of our internal tools, whose use-cases include content moderation, customer support, analytics, etc. Every person in our company and every one of our customers uses Algolia on a daily basis.
- Algolia is brain-dead simple to set up. I've implemented search with Algolia in a dozen different ways now, and it never took me longer than a few minutes to get the functionality I want. With Algolia, the only challenge is designing your search UI -- if you don't want to use their baked in UI solutions.
- Results come back incredibly fast. I'm not sure how Algolia does it, but every keystroke I make in a search field returns new results instantly. It's hard to believe that I'm searching large datasets on a remote server when it works so fast.
- Very little customization is needed for 99% of use-cases. Algolia's out of the box setup works great, and it takes no prior knowledge to set up.
- Recent pricing model changes made Algolia considerably more expensive. I understand that companies change their models all the time, but my plan almost doubled in price overnight. They let me keep my legacy plan for as long as I wanted, but I had already outgrown it, so a small increase in demand caused big price spikes. It's still cheap for what it is though.
- The documentation is generally good, but sometimes hard to navigate. I was trying to find examples of how to combine geo-queries with normal ones, and I couldn't find an example, but it wasn't actually hard to figure out.
- Some of the advanced features can be hard to understand at first. This isn't really a con, as it just means Algolia is loaded with features, but I was a bit overwhelmed the first time I tried to customize an index.
- Algolia has allowed us to make content on our app more discoverable than before. We used to have more naive search implementations, but since implementing Algolia, we've seen several metrics go up
- Average user session length has gone up ~25%
- Average items viewed per customer has increased
- Overall number of transactions has also gone up
I only used internally built tools for search before Algolia, but I was able to do more with a 15 minute implementation than my internal tools ever could do, and I spent many many hours developing them originally.