Their DocSearch program for open source projects is really great [0]. Check out the Jekyll docs [1] instant results that usually find just what you want. My only complaint is I want a plugin and play solution I can deploy for private internal documentation websites.
Algolia raises $110M for its search-as-a-service
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Re: Algolia raises $110M for its search-as-a-service
#12I’ve always had a hard time understanding the value proposition in the same way I don’t understand the value proposition of e.g. AWS Rekognition.
Paying per use certainly doesn’t make sense, because it has to be qualified by the accuracy you get per use.
And there’s no serious way to understand the accuracy you get per use (on your specific unusual distribution of queries) without employing the expensive ML / stats engineers you probably thought you could avoid hiring by outsourcing to Algolia / Rekognition in the first place.
But once you need to hire them anyway, you might as well utilize them to build this type of thing in-house in ways that are much more tailored and optimized around your in-house data models and data integration tools.
To put in perspective, I’ve worked in several companies (from small start-ups to large ecommerce sites) that have a variety of search needs spanning plug and play Lucene all the way to highly customized joint embedding neural network based nearest neighbor search, and tons in between.
The distribution of text in e.g. the support center search use case was totally different than the product search use case or the document store use case, where highly unique word distribution, special words, frequency of required updates to the search index, asymmetric costs of surfacing bad or deleted content items, etc., was the norm.
Every search use case was different and needed care to develop unique annotated result sets to measure mean reciprocal rank, NDCG, etc., as well as simple stakeholder subjective opinion of quality.
Short of basically hiring Algolia to be a gigantic consultant on all these things, I don’t see how it could actually be valuable.
I suspect it’s just an easy sell to CTO types that don’t really understand. They want “search” to be one problem with one little component to drop in to solve it, but it’s just not real.
Re: Algolia raises $110M for its search-as-a-service
#13Amazing product and team. Nicolas still finds time to help small startups like us. Their success is well deserved.
Re: Algolia raises $110M for its search-as-a-service
#14Congrats to the team! Although, am I the only one who finds that searching HN through Google gives better results than searching it through the Algolia powered HN search? For example, search "ml" in both, Algolia results are years old and don't seem that relevant, whereas Google picks up more recent threads.
Sample size of 1, but yes, I also tend to have better results using `query site:news.ycombinator.com` than using the built-in Algolia search.
I do this sometimes as well when Angolia isn't giving me the results I'm looking for.
Re: Algolia raises $110M for its search-as-a-service
#15Congrats to the team! Although, am I the only one who finds that searching HN through Google gives better results than searching it through the Algolia powered HN search? For example, search "ml" in both, Algolia results are years old and don't seem that relevant, whereas Google picks up more recent threads.
It's only as good as the HN team have configured the ranking and other algolia settings. Be nice for them to expose these.
Pretty sure HN's search is implemented by Algolia themselves. It's served from algolia.com.
Re: Algolia raises $110M for its search-as-a-service
#16Congrats to the team! Although, am I the only one who finds that searching HN through Google gives better results than searching it through the Algolia powered HN search? For example, search "ml" in both, Algolia results are years old and don't seem that relevant, whereas Google picks up more recent threads.
It all depends on what you’re trying to find when you search. Google knows your background, Algolia doesn’t.
I too built a search engine:
https://demo.insideropinion.com/meta_profiles?utf8=%E2%9C%93...
I find it works 100x better for me, when I weight results by my expertise. Basically, returning results based on what I already am familiar with.
Re: Algolia raises $110M for its search-as-a-service
#17Congrats to the team! Although, am I the only one who finds that searching HN through Google gives better results than searching it through the Algolia powered HN search? For example, search "ml" in both, Algolia results are years old and don't seem that relevant, whereas Google picks up more recent threads.
It all depends on what you’re trying to find when you search. Google knows your background, Algolia doesn’t. I too built a search engine: https://demo.insideropinion.com/meta_profiles?utf8=%E2%9C%93... I find it works 100x better for me, when I weight results by my expertise. Basically, returning results based on what I already am familiar with.
The results aren't necessarily better because of the Google knowledge of you, because they are pretty good results even in Private browsing without being logged in.
It just seems to me that HN search does a simple keyword matching and reordering based on points without any ranking (please someone correct if I'm wrong).
So freshness doesn't seem to have any value, but the reality is that, at least in tech, very few content is evergreen. Also, when you try to reorder by date for example, you'll end up with a lot of empty threads which again are not that useful. I'm not sure if there's a way of eliminating empty threads from search results.
Re: Algolia raises $110M for its search-as-a-service
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
It all depends on what you’re trying to find when you search. Google knows your background, Algolia doesn’t. I too built a search engine: https://demo.insideropinion.com/meta_profiles?utf8=%E2%9C%93... I find it works 100x better for me, when I weight results by my expertise. Basically, returning results based on what I already am familiar with.
The results aren't necessarily better because of the Google knowledge of you, because they are pretty good results even in Private browsing without being logged in. It just seems to me that HN search does a simple keyword matching and reordering based on points without any ranking (please someone correct if I'm wrong). So freshness doesn't seem to have any value, but the reality is that, at least in tech, very few co…
They rank by popularity by default (up votes), but I agree generally their API doesn’t seem to do ranking.
Re: Algolia raises $110M for its search-as-a-service
#19I’ve always had a hard time understanding the value proposition in the same way I don’t understand the value proposition of e.g. AWS Rekognition. Paying per use certainly doesn’t make sense, because it has to be qualified by the accuracy you get per use. And there’s no serious way to understand the accuracy you get per use (on your specific unusual distribution of queries) without employing the expensive ML / stats e…
You are absolutely factually correct in your analysis, but you are completely missing how business works.
Fundamentally, there is value to most businesses in being able to just buy a decent solution to a non core competency.
That’s where Algolia and AWS and basically all service companies come in... a medium scale clothing manufacturer with a booming e-commerce site may well know they have no clue how to do search, and no clue how to assess and hire individuals who could implement it, and no clue how to find and hire a cio who could put together a team from scratch who could do this on a reasonable timeline.
Re: Algolia raises $110M for its search-as-a-service
#20I’ve always had a hard time understanding the value proposition in the same way I don’t understand the value proposition of e.g. AWS Rekognition. Paying per use certainly doesn’t make sense, because it has to be qualified by the accuracy you get per use. And there’s no serious way to understand the accuracy you get per use (on your specific unusual distribution of queries) without employing the expensive ML / stats e…
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