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

Re: Thoughts on Algolia vs. Solr and Elasticsearch

#31

Post by softwaredoug » Sun, Jun 12, 2016, 12:20 PM UTC

redox_ wrote: post #30

softwaredoug wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True though this assumes these direct words are mentioned in the text (assuming know synonyms). Algolia has basic synonym functionality but ES gives you a lot more power here. Further the more words you remove, the less constrained the results get possibly creating a lot of noise. Though I assume you remove based on document frequency, which helps. This would be a problem with this strategy regardless of search engin…

Algolia has actually a very decent synonyms support: * mono & multi-words synonyms, * typo-tolerance is compliant with synonyms, * matching synonyms are highlighted, * prefix search works also on synonyms (even on multi words). A v2 of the synonyms API will be released in the next few days including: * dedicated API endpoints (leveraging existing synonyms but also Algolia's "alternative corrections" and "placeholders…

nice I stand corrected. The first list is what I knew about!

This is actually an interesting dividing line. As you get more sophisticated modeling fuzzier concepts over just synonyms (synonyms are just one tool for this) then I think you get out of algolias sweet spot. When text pushed into a feature space (which happens quite a lot when you're mapping vernaculars) you begin to gain more from Solr and ESs depth of customizability.

Re: Thoughts on Algolia vs. Solr and Elasticsearch

#32

Post by ch4s3 » Sun, Jun 12, 2016, 1:34 PM UTC

latenightcoding wrote: post #15

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.…

My experience has been that if search isn't critical to the core of your business, you should use Algolia. What I mean is that good search is hard and expensive to build, and if your product will not suffer from good enough search then it will be an order of magnitude cheaper. I use it to search over a list of 25k ish items that can be ordered broken into 4 categories. The users are domain experts and know what they're searching for. Algolia took me 45 minutes to set up and it returns results almost as fast as I can type, it was a no brainer.

However, if I had users that needed to lean on search to find things they didn't know about I would want to look into something that could infer meaning from the text input.

Re: Thoughts on Algolia vs. Solr and Elasticsearch

#33

Post by IndianAstronaut » Sun, Jun 12, 2016, 3:36 PM UTC

rpedela wrote: post #27

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…

If Postgres works for you then great, but it doesn't really compare to Solr/Elasticsearch. I haven't used Algolia so I cannot comment on it. Postgres is hard to use beyond very basic keyword searching and it doesn't support many standard features such as phrase search.

Interestingly, Solr also can do a lot of database type work. It can store not just documents for text searches, but also for numeric fields, aggregations, pivoting, etc. A nice tool for a data analysis back end. Even the Hue project uses it for its dashboard maker.