Thoughts on Algolia vs. Solr and Elasticsearch • Hacker News Board

Re: Thoughts on Algolia vs. Solr and Elasticsearch

#11

Post by Lxr » Sun, Jun 12, 2016, 2:30 AM UTC

softwaredoug wrote: post #9

ronack wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

> Algolia is great at known-item searches

I have not used Algolia much but that's not a particularly compelling selling point, most search engines tend to get it right if you know exactly what to query. The problem is this is, like, 1% of the difficulty of making a good search engine.

Re: Thoughts on Algolia vs. Solr and Elasticsearch

#12

Post by ronack » Sun, Jun 12, 2016, 2:32 AM UTC

softwaredoug wrote: post #9

ronack wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Totally agree, but in my example above I'm actually not even requiring vernacular mapping or any sort of conceptual disambiguation. Basic TF-IDF should rank that result pretty well and it certainly should not return 0 results.

Great article by the way!

Re: Thoughts on Algolia vs. Solr and Elasticsearch

#13

Post by softwaredoug » Sun, Jun 12, 2016, 2:34 AM UTC

softwaredoug wrote: post #9

ronack wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

@Lxr

In addition to being good at known item searches, my pitch for Algolia would be

(1) it's Easier to perform relevance tuning. You'd be surprised how annoying the Solr/ES defaults are. And the API is more advanced. (2) it has much better typo tolerance (again this gets at "known item" where you fat finger something)

Re: Thoughts on Algolia vs. Solr and Elasticsearch

#14

Post by ronack » Sun, Jun 12, 2016, 2:39 AM UTC

karterk wrote: post #10

ronack wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ha! First result for this:

site:producthunt.com mac voice control

Re: Thoughts on Algolia vs. Solr and Elasticsearch

#15

Post by latenightcoding » Sun, Jun 12, 2016, 2:57 AM UTC

I remember a previous employer asked me to talk to one of the authors because I have NLP and search engine design experience (I forgot which author). I remember he kept saying they don't do big data and that most NLP stuff other search engines use are irrelevant because their product works with the type of search they do. I asked a couple of complex questions which they disregarded as not important for their product.

This was probably 3 years ago or less so the product might have changed, but what I got out of that chat was that Algolia is for websites that want to add a search functionality with a nice UI without much hassle.

But if you are doing something complex it's does not compare to Solr or Elasticsearch

Again this was a while ago.

Re: Thoughts on Algolia vs. Solr and Elasticsearch

#16

Post by daphinz » Sun, Jun 12, 2016, 3:00 AM UTC

krokoo wrote: post #3

One 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

Whats your referral code?

Re: Thoughts on Algolia vs. Solr and Elasticsearch

#17

Post by mozumder » Sun, Jun 12, 2016, 3:01 AM UTC

Why would one use Algolia over Postgres's built in text search features? Ex: http://rachbelaid.com/postgres-full-text-search-is-good-enou...

I already have Postgres search queries running on the order of 1-3ms for large queries, basically faster than Algolia, with seemingly the same feature sets.

I don't understand the value proposition over something like Postgres, for sites that already have Postgres databases. (And I'm sure other databases might offer similar built-in search capabilities, I just don't know those other RDBMSs)

Re: Thoughts on Algolia vs. Solr and Elasticsearch

#18

Post by sciurus » Sun, Jun 12, 2016, 3:38 AM UTC

Of course, if you like what Doug has to say and are building your own search functionality on top of Solr or Elasticsearch, you'll want to buy his book:

https://www.manning.com/books/relevant-search

Re: Thoughts on Algolia vs. Solr and Elasticsearch

#19

Post by forgotpwtomain » Sun, Jun 12, 2016, 5:33 AM UTC

mozumder wrote: post #17

Why would one use Algolia over Postgres's built in text search features? Ex: http://rachbelaid.com/postgres-full-text-search-is-good-enou... I already have Postgres search queries running on the order of 1-3ms for large queries, basically faster than Algolia, with seemingly the same feature sets. I don't understand the value proposition over something like Postgres, for sites that already have Postgres databases. (An…

> Why would one use Algolia over Postgres's built in text search features? Ex: http://rachbelaid.com/postgres-full-text-search-is-good-enou....

Postgres built-in search features are really for large document searching -- we've tried using it for indexing e.g. an array of tags for auto-complete and the search times were in the ~500ms+ range, as a matter of fact the non-indexed regex search was only slightly slower. I thought the later was rather surprising - but asking on the mailing-lists, I was told that this was basically working as intended.

edit: I don't fully understand the value-proposition of Algolia either, most of the trouble with going outside of your production database for search - is the problem of keeping your data in sync and current with the production database; compared to that setting up an Elasticsearch cluster really isn't such a big deal, there are also half-way solutions, for example Amazon has an Elasticsearch-service.

Re: Thoughts on Algolia vs. Solr and Elasticsearch

#20

Post by JumpCrisscross » Sun, Jun 12, 2016, 5:35 AM UTC

ronack wrote: post #4

In 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.

> Algolia is OK for toy sites

Orthogonally agree. I can usually tell when a site's running Algolia by the asymmetry between the quality of the results (useless) and the familiarity of the site (high). It feels like the product is endorsed more for social, versus technical, reasons.