Thoughts on Algolia vs. Solr and Elasticsearch
opensourceconnections.com
Thoughts on Algolia vs. Solr and Elasticsearch
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Re: Thoughts on Algolia vs. Solr and Elasticsearch
#2I've had great experiences with algolia. I've used it on numerous client projects, and my own product https://appapp.io .
It is great as an out of the box search solution that will probably fit 90% of cases. It is blindingly fast and my clients love it.
I expect there are some cases where elastic or solr will be a better fit; but these are most definitely edge cases for very specific search requirements. Algolia is a killer app for generic 'good' search.
Re: Thoughts on Algolia vs. Solr and Elasticsearch
#3One of the least talked about search engines is NodeChef Cloud Search. Anybody using any language could use it insofar as they have a mongodb driver. Anyone who used it could comment on it? https://nodechef.com/nodechef-search-and-sql-analytics
Re: Thoughts on Algolia vs. Solr and Elasticsearch
#4In my experience, Algolia is OK for toy sites but not for anything even moderately complex. Even on HN it's often a challenge to find the right results. They seem to have gone with the philosophy that speed is more important than relevance. Keyword matching is only one small aspect of a good search experience.
Re: Thoughts on Algolia vs. Solr and Elasticsearch
#5(Author here) Case in point where Elasticsearch shines is one of yesterday's hacker news articles
http://sujitpal.blogspot.com/2016/05/elasticsearch-based-ima...
Here Elasticsearch is used as a framework where "search" really means some kind of distributed feature similarity. But even text search where your incorporating a lot of data science, external signals, or semantic awareness can fall more into the category of distributed feature similarity.
Algolias strength is in a simpler path to straightforward and easily understood search. I'm not sure it's the path to amazing and deeply customized search (or search-driven features). Algolia gets far more right out of the box at a configuration level many need when they can't put a team around building an amazing Solr/ES experience.
My hope is Solr/ES can learn a thing or two in the ease of use dept with relevance!
Re: Thoughts on Algolia vs. Solr and Elasticsearch
#6(Author here) Case in point where Elasticsearch shines is one of yesterday's hacker news articles http://sujitpal.blogspot.com/2016/05/elasticsearch-based-ima... Here Elasticsearch is used as a framework where "search" really means some kind of distributed feature similarity. But even text search where your incorporating a lot of data science, external signals, or semantic awareness can fall more into the category of…
If you like this article don't forget to listen to us chat with Algolia CTO on our podcast Search Disco
http://opensourceconnections.com/blog/2016/05/31/algolia-sea...
It's like the liner notes for the blog article...
Re: Thoughts on Algolia vs. Solr and Elasticsearch
#7In my experience, Algolia is OK for toy sites but not for anything even moderately complex. Even on HN it's often a challenge to find the right results. They seem to have gone with the philosophy that speed is more important than relevance. Keyword matching is only one small aspect of a good search experience.
For me Medium, Product Hunt, Digital Ocean or even Twitch are not "toy sites".
Re: Thoughts on Algolia vs. Solr and Elasticsearch
#8In my experience, Algolia is OK for toy sites but not for anything even moderately complex. Even on HN it's often a challenge to find the right results. They seem to have gone with the philosophy that speed is more important than relevance. Keyword matching is only one small aspect of a good search experience.
For me Medium, Product Hunt, Digital Ocean or even Twitch are not "toy sites".
Haven't tried the others, but Product Hunt's search is also extremely poor. Just today I searched for "mac voice control" (unquoted) and besides being very sluggish because of all the refreshing it does while I type, it returned 0 results. What I was looking for was Lacona [1] which was just featured a couple days ago and has a description containing two of the words from my query (1/3 of the description!).
Re: Thoughts on Algolia vs. Solr and Elasticsearch
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me Medium, Product Hunt, Digital Ocean or even Twitch are not "toy sites".
Haven't tried the others, but Product Hunt's search is also extremely poor. Just today I searched for "mac voice control" (unquoted) and besides being very sluggish because of all the refreshing it does while I type, it returned 0 results . What I was looking for was Lacona [1] which was just featured a couple days ago and has a description containing two of the words from my query (1/3 of the description!). [1] http…
This is actually a great example that shows where Algolia doesn't shine.
Algolia is great a known-item searches. Searches that are like looking up a contact in your phone list. This is a common use case with search, but one of only many.
Your use case is closer to grasping at straws because you don't know the language to use. You can't quite remember the name for something. This is also very common, and not handled well with purely string matching. Another example is in this blog article[1] where I talk about searching for "manual lawn mower" not realizing the right terminology is a "reel mower." Mapping vernacular is a hard problem, and I feel like Solr/ES while harder are better equipped for the problem.
(I also often find instant search distracting)
[1]http://opensourceconnections.com/blog/2014/06/10/what-is-sea...
Re: Thoughts on Algolia vs. Solr and Elasticsearch
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me Medium, Product Hunt, Digital Ocean or even Twitch are not "toy sites".
Haven't tried the others, but Product Hunt's search is also extremely poor. Just today I searched for "mac voice control" (unquoted) and besides being very sluggish because of all the refreshing it does while I type, it returned 0 results . What I was looking for was Lacona [1] which was just featured a couple days ago and has a description containing two of the words from my query (1/3 of the description!). [1] http…
Searching google for "producthunt mac voice control", the desired result came at number 4. Not bad.