My team switched to Algolia, and it's been a game changer for us. Great product, simple yet powerful API and a really helpful team. We use it both for our public facing properties (i.e https://tubitv.com/search/schwarzenegger) and also to power search for our internal video CMS
Powering Twitch and Medium, Algolia (YC W14) raises $53M
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Re: Powering Twitch and Medium, Algolia (YC W14) raises $53M
#52I miss the old HN search. The new one has some nice features, but it's missing basic search engine commands. I used to do search stuff like "ai OR artificial intelligence OR deeplearning..." to see if any articles on a certain subject have been posted today.
Did you try: ai "artificial intelligence" deeplearning
Forgot the quotes but it doesn't fix anything. There is no supported "OR" syntax or any kind of advanced search option.
Re: Powering Twitch and Medium, Algolia (YC W14) raises $53M
#53My team switched to Algolia, and it's been a game changer for us. Great product, simple yet powerful API and a really helpful team. We use it both for our public facing properties (i.e https://tubitv.com/search/schwarzenegger ) and also to power search for our internal video CMS
Yay! It's great to be working with you all at Tubi TV. Love, your Algolia account executive. :D
Re: Powering Twitch and Medium, Algolia (YC W14) raises $53M
#54Oh, that's the Hacker News site search... Works fine for me, except I always switch from "results by Relevance" to "Results by date", as in "Has this been posted already...?" Did not know Google is discontinuing its custom search engine. Looks like there may be a business opportunity here.
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
Wow, that is awesome! Thanks for making that!
Re: Powering Twitch and Medium, Algolia (YC W14) raises $53M
#55What about search inside enterprise? This is a place where there are tons of unstructured data: emails, slack, atlassian, code base. Search seems like a useful tool for employees. Permission control is another essential feature.
Yeah, definitely. It's a product category called, somewhat prosaically, "enterprise search." Algolia's appropriate for this in that we allow you to define data structures on a per-content source basis, and can show the most relevant results for each content source. Usually, enterprise search providers provide lots of out of the box connectors — with us, you'd just shove JSON into the proper index using one of the API clients.
Security is super important, but we can provide encryption-at-rest and have a secured API key [1] feature that allows you to segment your user base.
[1] - https://www.algolia.com/doc/guides/security/api-keys/#secure...
Re: Powering Twitch and Medium, Algolia (YC W14) raises $53M
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean Twitch has been passed between two giants and they're still using Algolia.
Two giants? As far as I'm aware, they've only ever been owned by Amazon or private.
Yeah, it was basically Justin.tv which morphed into Twitch and was bought by Amazon.
Re: Powering Twitch and Medium, Algolia (YC W14) raises $53M
#57Geez... Looking at all the praise from the tough HN crowd, I can only hope to one day build a product that's so widely loved.
Kudos to the team at Algolia. Hope you're bathing in pride this week. Looks like the praise is widespread and well earned.
Re: Powering Twitch and Medium, Algolia (YC W14) raises $53M
#58Awesome! Great opportunity.
Re: Powering Twitch and Medium, Algolia (YC W14) raises $53M
#59Guess I always assumed Algolia wasn't anything special. Anyone know what exactly makes it worth so much?
They are one of the very few companies in that space which still develop their own search technology instead of just adopting and mixing available open source packages. Most other search software these days runs on some flavour of Lucene and rightfully so IMO because Lucene is a rock solid piece of software. This means that creating a defensible USP in that space isn't easy. Algolia did it by essentially developing t…
plus, from the reading I did, the founders have been working in the search space for a long time and really seem to know what they're doing.
Lucene is great, but, it does have limitations: tough to embed in non-JVM applications and poor support for tokenizing things like emojis are two immediate things that come to mind.
Elasticsearch is maybe my favorite data storage product in the last 15 years, but the Algolia folks have taken a different approach that is also quite interesting.
Re: Powering Twitch and Medium, Algolia (YC W14) raises $53M
#60Algolia 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 descending respectively. Sorting by anything else, like price, means creating yet more indexes and suddenly it's easy to turn 30K records into 150K. This happened to me and I ended up having to roll something custom instead (Vuejs frontend and Sphinx Search backend), since my client balked at the extra cost.
But, if you have a small dataset, or are fine with the costs, then Algolia is spectacular.