Building your own internal search capabilities that are rich, real-time, and fast is quite a project. Add to it geographic search, images, commerce and mobile and you’re basically developing an entire platform. We were just speaking to a manufacturer this morning about their search capabilities and that the element needs to be more prounounced on their site.
No need to develop your own – Algolia is a fully hosted search service, available as a REST API. API clients are available for all major frameworks, platforms and languages and data transmission between clients and the API is in JSON format.
Features of Algolia
- High-Performance – response times up to 200 times faster than Elasticsearch, and up to 20,000 times faster than SQLite FTS4. Indexing is asynchronous so users can search new data seconds after an update. They also expose an API for checking indexing status.
- Nginx – Algolia’s server-side implementation is fully written in C++ and embedded as a module inside the Nginx high-performance HTTP server.
- Dashboard – One graphical interface for all operations, including usage, performance, settings, API logs, API keys and data browsing.
- Database search – designed to search records, not pages
A perfect solution for SQL and NoSQL databases, with a transparent ranking algorithm optimized for semi-structured data. - Multi-attributes – accepts object types and any number of attributes to search on.
- Search as you type – beyond simple auto-completion, users get updated search results with each letter they type.
- Relevance – fully customizable and transparent ranking. Algolia provides the easiest way to sort results by popularity while also maintaining relevance.
- Mobile – designed for mobile… fast, forgive typos and sort results by geo distance.
- Linguistics – Search in any written language. For example, searching using simplified Chinese can find matching hits in traditional Chinese.
- Typo Corrections – Algolia understands typos, even in the first few letters, so your users can still find what they’re looking for.
- Smart Highlighting – Highlight which section matched the user’s query, even if the section is only the first few letters of a word and contains typos.
- Realtime Faceting – the only search engine to suggest facets as you type, so users get faceting results after the first keystroke.
- Geo-search – display hits by distance, or only those nearby, or in a particular area. Combine with text queries and any other search features.
- High Availability – a 99.99% SLA (service-level agreement). All data entries are automatically indexed on three different high-end servers.
- Multi-datacenters – keep response time low by choosing the datacenter closest to your users.
- First-class security – API keys restrict access to a specific index, and set limits such as the maximum query rate for an IP address, or the key expiration time.
