I thought to do some experiment with Algolia and I must say I am impressed by its speed. I would love to know what architecture/solution they use to power their search engine. A basic high level overview will be great.
I am sure I am not the only one who will benefit from this.
Thanks..
Sylvain Utard
VP of Engineering @ Algolia
The Algolia service is powered by a home-made search engine implemented in C++ which is hosted inside a NGINX server as a NGINX module. The search engine has originally been designed for mobile devices: it was actually a mobile SDK (providing an offline search engine SDK to be embedded in an app) before being an online API. Good thing is that on a mobile devices you need to optimize everything at the milliseconds level because you've no RAM/CPU/DISK \o/ Now that the same technology runs on high-end clusters of machines, it's even faster :)
The whole stack is described here and summarized here.