Search posts, tags, users, and pages
Why should I use Algolia if I can use full-text search, ElasticSearch or Solr for my app?
We redesigned from scratch how search engines work, mainly to fix the following issues:
Relevance: we provide a different approach to relevance that gives you a predictable ability to mix textual relevance and business date (We know well the pain of trying to tune the big relevance mathematical formula: you improve one query but you degrade a lot of others. We use a n-dimensions sort, also known as tie-breaking, to make sure you always have control over your relevance.
Performance: we optimize everything at the millisecond level, and our goal is to make it impossible to do it faster :) We have a unique infrastructure deployed in 36 data centers across 15 regions and software optimized at the millisecond. Focus: we’ve designed our engine to reproduce the experience you would get on Google or Amazon on any website, focusing on the user-facing search experience. The one you use every day, handling typo-tolerance & providing results in real-time -> it turns out that this is a lot different than analytics, dashboarding or alerting that the competition is focusing on.
UI/UX: we don't only provide the engine but expert advice and libraries to deliver a great UX
Dev-friendliness: we are developers, so we know the joy of using a well designed API
Support: the developers building the product are the ones doing the support, and we don’t plan to change that anytime soon
If you're building a user-facing search bar and you want a search experience that looks like you have on Google and Amazon, we're definitely the best fit. That's because we've designed our engine to handle as-you-type search & typing mistakes and injecting business data in the ranking algorithm to provide your users the best text & business relevance.
We're also Elasticsearch users, we use it for its analytic/aggregation capabilities: we're building analytics on top of our end-user queries (just to be clear: we're NOT using Elasticsearch for the Algolia search API). It's a very good piece of software but we don't use their ranking or full-text search capabilities.