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Powering Twitch and Medium, Algolia (YC W14) raises $53M

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Re: Powering Twitch and Medium, Algolia (YC W14) raises $53M

#101

Post by jlemoine »

jsk2600 wrote: post #76
stevoski wrote: post #6

Anyone care to share positive and negative experiences of using Algolia to power search in your SaaS? (We're currently using MySQL's full-text search and are finding it to be a long way short of the experience we'd like our customers to have.)

We've been using Algolia in production for 8 months and moved to self-hosted elasticsearch. Small dataset, 2,5million records in 10 indexes IIRC, data structures and filtering were quite complex. Algolia Pros: * very nice UI/dashboard, stats, lots of options, flexible * documentation is nice, 'onboarding' was not an issue * it worked reliably most of the time Cons: * lock-in/proprietary. Think twice if you want to ba…

I am sad to see you had a bad experience with Algolia and I can assure you that we put a lot of effort on backward compatibility:

* we have never discontinued a feature in the API since the launch

* We never broke our API clients, we proposed a new version when a new feature required a big change but we kept the previous version (and this happened only on two API client in 5 years)

For the support, this is our engineer's team working on the product that does the support and we put a lot of effort to make sure all our customers are satisfied and get the relevant answers.

Then if you got the same customer experience with a $40 machine, you have probably not used all the feature/power of the engine. I am sad to see such a feedback and you can make me accountable to make sure we will do everything we can to satisfy all our users

Re: Powering Twitch and Medium, Algolia (YC W14) raises $53M

#102

Post by haroenv »

yannyu wrote: post #87
gregpardo wrote: post #43

This is great for something like a public website. What about a situation where I want some of my users to only be authorized to view some of my data based on a set of rules I set in my backend application. Can Agolia accomplish this? EDIT: Looks like they do support this.. https://www.algolia.com/doc/api-client/ruby/api-keys/#genera... However, I think for a small project it will probably be extra work to keep these…

You could just as easily set up Solr/Elasticsearch locally and index your data for searching. It'll give you the advantage of being able to do more complex queries, faceting, grouping, stemming, synonyms, and things that you expect from a modern search experience.

All of that is out of the box with Algolia FYI :)

Re: Powering Twitch and Medium, Algolia (YC W14) raises $53M

#103

Post by jlemoine »

jsk2600 wrote: post #76
stevoski wrote: post #6

Anyone care to share positive and negative experiences of using Algolia to power search in your SaaS? (We're currently using MySQL's full-text search and are finding it to be a long way short of the experience we'd like our customers to have.)

We've been using Algolia in production for 8 months and moved to self-hosted elasticsearch. Small dataset, 2,5million records in 10 indexes IIRC, data structures and filtering were quite complex. Algolia Pros: * very nice UI/dashboard, stats, lots of options, flexible * documentation is nice, 'onboarding' was not an issue * it worked reliably most of the time Cons: * lock-in/proprietary. Think twice if you want to ba…

In any case, I would be happy to get your detailed feedback by email (julien at algolia.com). I see it as a good opportunity for us to improve ourselves

Re: Powering Twitch and Medium, Algolia (YC W14) raises $53M

#104

Post by simplehuman »

DanBC wrote: post #26
simplehuman wrote: post #2

I definitely love the hn search which is powered by algolia. Fast and instant. I wish it was possible to turn off fuzzy matching in some cases.

There's a "typo tolerance" option in the settings that may help?

Oh wow, I didn't notice the settings in the top bar. Thanks!

Re: Powering Twitch and Medium, Algolia (YC W14) raises $53M

#105

Post by rayrutjes »

naiv wrote: post #62
omurphy27 wrote: post #60

Algolia is an amazing service and an absolute joy to use. They deserve all the praise they're getting and then some. However, it's easy to exceed their record limits, especially since you need to duplicate your index every time you want to 'sort by' something. For instance, if I wanted an option to sort my results by date, and to then search these, I'd need to create 2 new slave indexes for date ascending and descend…

Yes, especially if you have records that not even change often. If you have 300,000 items in an index that you want to sort in 4 ways and want to update eg the price daily, you already consumed 36 million operations of the biggest non enterprise plan that includes 50 million operations. Just by testing and tweaking the index every other day, we already use up to 500,000 operations. But then again setting up search in…

(n.b: I am an engineer at Algolia) Algolia's engine computes relevance at indexing time by design, allowing us to deliver optimal search performance at query time. As a result, each new `sort` - by price, by name, by date added - requires several indices containing identical data.

To make this easy to implement, we provide a way to create index replicas, read-only indices that can have different settings from the master index.

When using replicas, every record added to a master index gets also added to the replica index. Same goes for deletion and update operations.

All indexing operations done on replicas are not billed.

By using replicas, you can adjust your calculate by removing the factor of four you included for each index, meaning that 300K*30 days = 9million operations/month. This assumes you update the entire index daily, whereas you could also only update the prices that changed, which would in turn further reduce the number of operations.

Re: Powering Twitch and Medium, Algolia (YC W14) raises $53M

#106

Post by alasano »

leggomylibro wrote: post #27

I think that Adafruit uses them, too. What I notice with their results is that they start strong, but fall off very rapidly into partial gibberish. For example, say I want to make a battery-powered project. I search "lipo." The results start out promising; charging boards, including a few options tailored to specific popular boards. But by the time we get to the end of page 1, only every other result or so is actuall…

Ideally you'll get everything you need in the first page anyways but generally speaking if you have complex part numbers or product series, it's harder to get right. I think that machine learning is essential to improve relevance over time without having to resort to manual tweaks.

Re: Powering Twitch and Medium, Algolia (YC W14) raises $53M

#107

Post by yannyu »

haroenv wrote: post #102
yannyu wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could just as easily set up Solr/Elasticsearch locally and index your data for searching. It'll give you the advantage of being able to do more complex queries, faceting, grouping, stemming, synonyms, and things that you expect from a modern search experience.

All of that is out of the box with Algolia FYI :)

Absolutely, I was saying the features were modern compared to PostGres search :)

Re: Powering Twitch and Medium, Algolia (YC W14) raises $53M

#108

Post by leggomylibro »

alasano wrote: post #106
leggomylibro wrote: post #27

I think that Adafruit uses them, too. What I notice with their results is that they start strong, but fall off very rapidly into partial gibberish. For example, say I want to make a battery-powered project. I search "lipo." The results start out promising; charging boards, including a few options tailored to specific popular boards. But by the time we get to the end of page 1, only every other result or so is actuall…

Ideally you'll get everything you need in the first page anyways but generally speaking if you have complex part numbers or product series, it's harder to get right. I think that machine learning is essential to improve relevance over time without having to resort to manual tweaks.

Adafruit does have it tough; they try to bridge sites like Amazon and Digikey by having a very broad selection of products specific to electronics, but they don't actually have many parts in each of those categories. They focus more on supporting what they have with documentation and software and whatnot.

But sites like Digikey/Mouser/etc have searching down. If I want a capacitor, first I pick what kind (electrolytic, ceramic, tantalum, etc,) and then I am presented with dozens of menus representing specific attributes that I care about. Capacitance, temperature coefficient, size/pakaging, manufacturer- whatever you could possibly want to select on, you can.

Sometimes I wish that other digital distribution platforms would take inspiration from that 'catalog' model. Discovery is difficult, these days.

Re: Powering Twitch and Medium, Algolia (YC W14) raises $53M

#109

Post by arikr »

searchfaster wrote: post #78
arikr wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice. This brings up a related point. How strong are the defensibility and separately the network effects in Algolia's business? I guess once they have a customer, it might be annoying for that customer to switch. Is that accurate? But is there any reason for the 101th customer to use Algolia other than the brand? My hunch says no, and that there aren't any network effects.

Thanks ! Actually 40% of our current beta users are existing Algolia customers. Maintaining separate indexes for every sorting / ranking option and intentionally restricting the application to stay under limit is a drawback that many complain about. Our On-Premises option is something which a few potential customers have been interested in.

So won't you have the same problem?

Limited customer lock in?

Re: Powering Twitch and Medium, Algolia (YC W14) raises $53M

#110

Post by ekzy »

adjkant wrote: post #80
ekzy wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to know if something has already been posted on hacker news and are using chrome, I've made an extension for that purpose. It's a reverse lookup that uses algolia search. It's not perfect but I use it daily and solves this problem https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-lookup... Hope you find it useful

Why does the extension need browser history permissions? I see it states it does not use it, so curious what it's needed for. Cool idea regardless, just curious.

It's not used. I just need access to the current tab url and the ability to open tabs, but I am not sure how to require less permission... The manifest file looks like this:

  "permissions": [
    "tabs",
    "https://hn.algolia.com/"
  ]
See: https://github.com/jazzytomato/hnlookup/blob/master/resource...

Thanks for the heads up, I will investigate.

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