The issue with Algolia is that they have insane technology but it is mostly used only to search documentation.<p>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.<p>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 am about to roll out search on Shepherd.com and looking at using Algolia. I've been impressed with Algolia on Hacker News...<p>Is anyone else using them? What are your impressions so far?<p>Much appreciated
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 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!
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