Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Algolia Acquires Search.io

algolia.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 49 posts

Re: Algolia Acquires Search.io

#21

Post by jabo »

Note: I work on Typesense [1], an open source alternative to Algolia.

This is an interesting acquisition from my perspective because we also just started working on adding vector search to Typesense about a month ago.

So you can now do nearest neighbor searches by bringing your vectors into Typesense. This lets you do things like similarity searches, recommendations, etc.

I’d love to have more beta testers use the feature and give us feedback. If you’d like to try it out, please send me an email: jasonb at typesense dOt org

In any case, congratulations Search.io / Sajari team!

[1] https://typesense.org/

Re: Algolia Acquires Search.io

#22

Post by dustincoates »

tomrod wrote: post #12
dustincoates wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vector search is incredibly powerful on matching on context or similarity. For example, automobile and car are semantically similar and, and one will rank well for the other in a search. Vector search, though, isn't as good on handling typos and not good at all when it comes to as you type searching. Vehic won't match on auto, for example. We believe that there is use for each of these approaches and a use in a singl…

Do yall have a technical blog? I would love to both understand the problem and methods, domains yall cross (eg biometrics and fuzzy matching?), and how yall integrate in different industries. A good search partner is hard to find. PageRank is fun and all, but I believe better methods exist these days.

Here's a link to our engineering blog posts: https://www.algolia.com/blog/engineering/

And our CTO, Julien, wrote an "Inside the Engine" series on how our search engine works. It doesn't have the new "hybrid search" but it shows you the base of how we do search: https://www.algolia.com/blog/engineering/inside-the-algolia-...

Re: Algolia Acquires Search.io

#23

Post by kartoolOz »

gk1 wrote: post #11
O__________O wrote: post #10

From the Search.io homepage, “we are the only search technology supporting full upserts. Your updates are instantly live in milliseconds, no matter the scale.“ Anyone able to speculate how they were able to achieve this? Or for that matter beyond good sales & marketing - what technically gave them an edge that market actually needed?

This is easily disproved: Pinecone (disclaimer: I work there) also supports live index updates... "no matter the scale." I think their marketing folks have gone a little far, and I say that as a marketing person.

Even self hosted milvus supports this.

Re: Algolia Acquires Search.io

#24

Post by kartoolOz »

dustincoates wrote: post #4
swyx wrote: post #3

some interesting points from this other piece "While the acquisition price was undisclosed, media reports suggest Algolia paid more than $100 million for Search.io" https://www.businessnewsaustralia.com/articles/french-unicor... "Search.io’s mission is to “enable every organization to build smart search and discovery solutions.” The company was founded in 2014 by Hamish Ogilvy and David Howden (originally named Sajar…

Vector search is incredibly powerful on matching on context or similarity. For example, automobile and car are semantically similar and, and one will rank well for the other in a search. Vector search, though, isn't as good on handling typos and not good at all when it comes to as you type searching. Vehic won't match on auto, for example. We believe that there is use for each of these approaches and a use in a singl…

These are relatively easy to build and can be used for a variety of tasks like Entity Resolution, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32825679

Re: Algolia Acquires Search.io

#25

Post by peterstjohn »

gk1 wrote: post #11
O__________O wrote: post #10

From the Search.io homepage, “we are the only search technology supporting full upserts. Your updates are instantly live in milliseconds, no matter the scale.“ Anyone able to speculate how they were able to achieve this? Or for that matter beyond good sales & marketing - what technically gave them an edge that market actually needed?

This is easily disproved: Pinecone (disclaimer: I work there) also supports live index updates... "no matter the scale." I think their marketing folks have gone a little far, and I say that as a marketing person.

Heh, my eyes did pop at that one, considering we've also been doing that over here since 2020 at least ;)

Re: Algolia Acquires Search.io

#26

Post by theallan »

jabo wrote: post #21

Note: I work on Typesense [1], an open source alternative to Algolia. This is an interesting acquisition from my perspective because we also just started working on adding vector search to Typesense about a month ago. So you can now do nearest neighbor searches by bringing your vectors into Typesense. This lets you do things like similarity searches, recommendations, etc. I’d love to have more beta testers use the fe…

Just wanted to say thank you for Typesense. I use it for my own open source software [1] and integration with it was really easy.

More generally, I think it is great to see development in this area from Algolia and Search.io to Typesense and others. Being able to have a customisable search which is really fast, can make a bit difference on a web-site.

[1] https://datatables.net

Re: Algolia Acquires Search.io

#27

Post by slivanes »

theallan wrote: post #26
jabo wrote: post #21

Note: I work on Typesense [1], an open source alternative to Algolia. This is an interesting acquisition from my perspective because we also just started working on adding vector search to Typesense about a month ago. So you can now do nearest neighbor searches by bringing your vectors into Typesense. This lets you do things like similarity searches, recommendations, etc. I’d love to have more beta testers use the fe…

Just wanted to say thank you for Typesense. I use it for my own open source software [1] and integration with it was really easy. More generally, I think it is great to see development in this area from Algolia and Search.io to Typesense and others. Being able to have a customisable search which is really fast, can make a bit difference on a web-site. [1] https://datatables.net

Thank you for building DataTables - very useful web software.

Re: Algolia Acquires Search.io

#28

Post by Cthulhu_ »

chairmanwow1 wrote: post #14

This article is tripping over itself to tell you how great they are. PR like this just feels like it was written by a college kid or makes me feel like they are compensating for technical inadequacy. No thanks.

It's not written for technical people, it's for business, management, financial people, the SEC and (potential) investors.

Re: Algolia Acquires Search.io

#29

Post by jabo »

theallan wrote: post #26
jabo wrote: post #21

Note: I work on Typesense [1], an open source alternative to Algolia. This is an interesting acquisition from my perspective because we also just started working on adding vector search to Typesense about a month ago. So you can now do nearest neighbor searches by bringing your vectors into Typesense. This lets you do things like similarity searches, recommendations, etc. I’d love to have more beta testers use the fe…

Just wanted to say thank you for Typesense. I use it for my own open source software [1] and integration with it was really easy. More generally, I think it is great to see development in this area from Algolia and Search.io to Typesense and others. Being able to have a customisable search which is really fast, can make a bit difference on a web-site. [1] https://datatables.net

Thank you for saying that and thank you for building DataTables!

I've heard about DataTables in various contexts over the years, so it's really cool to hear that you've integrated it with Typesense.

Re: Algolia Acquires Search.io

#30

Post by dnc »

dustincoates wrote: post #4
swyx wrote: post #3

some interesting points from this other piece "While the acquisition price was undisclosed, media reports suggest Algolia paid more than $100 million for Search.io" https://www.businessnewsaustralia.com/articles/french-unicor... "Search.io’s mission is to “enable every organization to build smart search and discovery solutions.” The company was founded in 2014 by Hamish Ogilvy and David Howden (originally named Sajar…

Vector search is incredibly powerful on matching on context or similarity. For example, automobile and car are semantically similar and, and one will rank well for the other in a search. Vector search, though, isn't as good on handling typos and not good at all when it comes to as you type searching. Vehic won't match on auto, for example. We believe that there is use for each of these approaches and a use in a singl…

> Vector search, though, isn't as good on handling typos and not good at all when it comes to as you type searching. Vehic won't match on auto, for example.

This is incorrect in general case and it entirely depends on the model that is used to produce word vectors and the text corpus the model is trained with.

For instance, fastText model is trained on words, but also their parts (n-grams), so it should produce word vectors that would be close (in cosine-distance) to vectors of their corresponding typos and partials, even if the text corpus that was used to train the model doesn't contain same typos and partially typed words verbatim.

Post reply on HN