A helpful platform that makes search easy and saves time
May 02, 2025

A helpful platform that makes search easy and saves time

Will Essilfie | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Algolia

We use Algolia to help support multiple parts of our marketplace -- resource search, trending search queries/autocomplete, and select re-ranking tools. These enable us to serve the millions of educators who use TPT to save time and find the resources they need to support their students. We use a mix of Algolia's UI as well as in-house platforms and systems to manage our system and help us catalog and easily handle discoverability for the millions of resources available on our platform and to index all new resources being added every hour by our community of Teacher Authors.

Pros

  • Intuitive analytics about search performance
  • Helpful and technical customer support and account management teams
  • Customization to modify their product to specific business use cases
  • Ability to test new optimizations for search ranking to improve results and meet business needs

Cons

  • Better integration of features (ex. synonyms feature is great but isn't respected by their re-ranking product)
  • Tooling to reduce spam search queries being triaged by system/logged to analytics panels
  • More automated summaries of analytics (ie. recommend synonyms to add, trends noticed in search volume in specific areas of site, easier ways to leverage API vs using website UI)
  • Increase in sales by > 5% at launch
  • Less engineering time required to make search algorithm changes
There are many open source search products available. Prior to Algolia, we used an in-house search system adopted from an open-source system. While this was nice in that we could modify it in any way we wanted, it also required dedicated engineering and setting up many analytics tools and monitoring systems to ensure it stayed performant/could adapt to our ever evolving needs. Algolia takes a load off our plate and frees our engineers to work on bigger problems vs minute search changes or monitoring. It also empowers our product teams to directly use the AI to make basic changes and see analytics in one easy place. We chose Algolia to increase development velocity and reduce the hidden costs of maintaining and operating open-source code/search tools.

Do you think Algolia delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Algolia's feature set?

Yes

Did Algolia live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Algolia go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Algolia again?

Yes

I'd definitely recommend Algolia for a business operating in the ecommerce space and looking to integrate search quickly. Using the tool is easy to set up and works well. Out of the box you can have search, autocomplete, and recommendations that are all integrated. If you integrate directly, Algolia works well for also using their internal A/B test system.

Areas where Algolia can be harder to use are in user-generated marketplaces. On a site where you control / own / produce all your inventory of results, you are solely optimizing for revenue/conversion. When you have a platform where there are different creators for each item, you need to balance revenue optimization with trying to support the business goals of the sellers on your marketplace platform. Algolia offers less tooling there which can be difficult and will require you build additional tooling/monitoring for that. Given that need, you likely cannot use all of Algolia's UI tools like A/B testing.

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