Incase someone doesn't know already: they have a HN search too! https://hn.algolia.com/
Algolia raises $110M for its search-as-a-service
41–50 of 115 posts
Re: Algolia raises $110M for its search-as-a-service
#42Are there any good open source alternatives?
Re: Algolia raises $110M for its search-as-a-service
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you’d already have to hire pretty much all the same staff This is terribly wrong. It's like saying you need as many people to setup Solr/ElasticSearch as you'd need to build a custom search engine. It requires considerably fewer people to setup, manage, and optimize Algolia than it does to setup, manage, and optimize ES. Case in point, Twilio.
You’re not even addressing the engineering costs though. The portion of cost of a search engine solution attributable to the set up of Elastic Search is basically zero. The cost is understanding if the search surfaces relevant items for the specific use case, including asymmetric costs for surfacing bad items in many use cases. Not to mention that plug and play third party solutions like Solr / ES are highly inapplic…
Sounds like a good case for Algolia Professional Services! (If this exists?)
I remember pushing Google's search appliance for a large media company some 10 years ago or so (no benefit to myself though, which was pretty noob). It made sense at the time, and solved something for them better than they probably would have implemented it themselves in a good enough way. The most complicated part was setting up rules about what was public / private / internal etc.
Re: Algolia raises $110M for its search-as-a-service
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems like companies don't have to evaluate it your way? They could informally try it out on a few searches and say, "seems to work better than the other one." This is how Google became popular. Or maybe do an A/B test. It's a little more formal but doesn't require any search-specific knowledge either.
This approach typically fails quite bad in practice. The subjective impression of success depends on the people around at the time of the decision and the set of queries they chose to inspect. As corner cases pop up with significant cost in production (e.g. surfacing nudity in an image search for a query where it’s highly inappropriate) you become less and less capable of understanding why or hacking business logic i…
What do you do when you don’t have the budget for a team of in-house experts and you need something that is good enough and you need it now.
Re: Algolia raises $110M for its search-as-a-service
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you’d already have to hire pretty much all the same staff This is terribly wrong. It's like saying you need as many people to setup Solr/ElasticSearch as you'd need to build a custom search engine. It requires considerably fewer people to setup, manage, and optimize Algolia than it does to setup, manage, and optimize ES. Case in point, Twilio.
You’re not even addressing the engineering costs though. The portion of cost of a search engine solution attributable to the set up of Elastic Search is basically zero. The cost is understanding if the search surfaces relevant items for the specific use case, including asymmetric costs for surfacing bad items in many use cases. Not to mention that plug and play third party solutions like Solr / ES are highly inapplic…
I set up algolia for a client while doing some work for them. We needed to add search to a website we were building which searched over data in the client's CMS.
I could have set up elasticsearch. But algolia was cheap and easy to configure, and we could just click around the algolia UI to tweak things like "number of allowed spelling mistakes". We didn't need to proxy anything or set up routes - we just pulled in the algolia JS library to run queries from the application. It was easier for the client to maintain in an ongoing way rather than maintaining their own elasticsearch instance on EC2 or something like that.
I'm sure there are plenty of times you'd want to run your own elasticsearch instance, and I think that would also have been a reasonable choice for us. But I still feel pretty happy with the choice to use algolia.
Arguments to set up your own elasticsearch instance remind me of the criticism against dropbox - "just run your own server with rsync! Its so easy!". Paying someone a small amount of money to do that for me is often a great deal.
Re: Algolia raises $110M for its search-as-a-service
#46It's interesting to see this valuation on search as a service, given the leader, Elastic, is in obvious valuation trouble. The market is unimpressed: the Elastic stock hasn't net moved higher since mid January (so most of the time they've been public). Just take a look at the actual business performance of Elastic. $271m in sales for the last fiscal year. Negative $101 million operating loss. Pretty bad, although not…
Maybe Elastic isn't growing because Algolia is eating their lunch?
Re: Algolia raises $110M for its search-as-a-service
#47It's interesting to see this valuation on search as a service, given the leader, Elastic, is in obvious valuation trouble. The market is unimpressed: the Elastic stock hasn't net moved higher since mid January (so most of the time they've been public). Just take a look at the actual business performance of Elastic. $271m in sales for the last fiscal year. Negative $101 million operating loss. Pretty bad, although not…
I think that Elastic is running into a different issue, with AWS (and possibly other cloud providers) making it hard for them to follow the obvious monetization path (hosting).
Algolia, because it doesn't have an open source offering, doesn't have that issue.
Re: Algolia raises $110M for its search-as-a-service
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, a…
I’m saying in my experience there is no such thing as one singular “decent solution” for search. It varies enormously from use case to use case, customer cohort to customer cohort, etc. To even know if you’re buying a decent solution from Algolia or not, you’d already have to hire pretty much all the same staff you’d have to hire to more cost-effectively build it in-house. I think the fundamental myth, just like with…
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Re: Algolia raises $110M for its search-as-a-service
#49It's interesting to see this valuation on search as a service, given the leader, Elastic, is in obvious valuation trouble. The market is unimpressed: the Elastic stock hasn't net moved higher since mid January (so most of the time they've been public). Just take a look at the actual business performance of Elastic. $271m in sales for the last fiscal year. Negative $101 million operating loss. Pretty bad, although not…
Maybe Elastic isn't growing because Algolia is eating their lunch?
elastic isn’t competing with algolia, imo. elastic is after the enterprise customers who have a mission-critical need for search (rather than a casual need like algolia users)
but I think mission-critical search is a niche technical problem that isn’t applicable to many enterprises.
Re: Algolia raises $110M for its search-as-a-service
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you’d already have to hire pretty much all the same staff This is terribly wrong. It's like saying you need as many people to setup Solr/ElasticSearch as you'd need to build a custom search engine. It requires considerably fewer people to setup, manage, and optimize Algolia than it does to setup, manage, and optimize ES. Case in point, Twilio.
You’re not even addressing the engineering costs though. The portion of cost of a search engine solution attributable to the set up of Elastic Search is basically zero. The cost is understanding if the search surfaces relevant items for the specific use case, including asymmetric costs for surfacing bad items in many use cases. Not to mention that plug and play third party solutions like Solr / ES are highly inapplic…
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