Search posts, tags, users, and pages
Is it true that Algolia was first made for Mobile Apps? If that’s the case what made you change your mind?
Yes that's true :) We first designed our engine to run on mobile phones: building a small SDK you would embed in your mobile application. After a few months, we had a very good search engine, running on the cheapest Android phone (with no RAM, no CPU, no Disk) but the business was tough. It turns out that our users had exactly the same needs on their websites; so we just pivoted to SAAS: kept the same engine, hosted on clusters of 3 high-end machines \o/
Our first offline SDK is still used in several mobile apps. I remember one benchmark with one index of 1M record having search performance under 50ms on a old Iphone 3GS. Seems so old right now ... but we have kept most of the algorithms and datastructures in our SaaS API.
Yes it is true! We basically saw so many unanswered questions on StackOverFlow about how to implement Lucene in mobile apps that we thought it would be a great problem to tackle :) The thing is the market was not as great as we expected/hoped or maybe more difficult to penetrate. We did, however, get a lot of positive feedback about the UX of the search with people wanted to do the same thing online. So we pivoted :) And that was one of our best decisions! We rapidly realized that all the choices we made for mobile were great fits for user-facing search! Because of the hardware constraints of mobile, we couldn’t use the traditional search approaches used by Elasticsearch for example. The form factor also drove a lot of our decisions (instant display of results as you type, typing mistake tolerance, factoring geo-distance in the ranking, etc.). In the end it shaped the technology and is a big reason for our current success :) We probably never would have made the same choices had we started on servers.