Algolia raises $110M for its search-as-a-service

Post by xapata » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 3:36 AM UTC

donretag wrote: post #61

AznHisoka wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Elastic is not even after the search market, but the analytics/loggin/reporting sector. Of course, they are after every customer, but one Elastic rep told me that 75% of customers are not using Elasticsearch for traditional search.

Post by im_cynical » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 4:31 AM UTC

Post by lonelappde » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 5:46 AM UTC

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #35

tomnipotent wrote: post #31

Earlier 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…

Post by orliesaurus » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 6:05 AM UTC

Post by xps » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 6:43 AM UTC

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #21

apalmer wrote: post #19

Earlier 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…