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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

#71

Post by BjoernKW »

zigzigzag wrote: post #65
BjoernKW wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are you sure? I thought Algolia literally was Solr (which is ElasticSearch which is Lucene).

Yes, I'm sure. I talked to one of the founders about 2 years ago. Algolia is written in C / C++ from the ground up.

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

#72

Post by jerska »

aphextron wrote: post #69

Does anyone know their tech stack? I assume it's just a giant elasticsearch cluster.

Custom-made C++ engine - baked into an nginx plugin - no elasticsearch nor lucene in the stack, except to gather analytics on the side. It has been made to solve user-facing search only, where elasticsearch couldn't meet the same speed because it's trying to solve a lot of other things.

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

#73

Post by pcsanwald »

rpedela wrote: post #66
pcsanwald wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fol…

Can you expand on emoji tokenization? I don't understand what you mean?

the lucene standard tokenizer doesn't offer support for tokenizing emojis: it strips them out. I'm not aware of any lucene tokenizer that does support emojis tokenization. This isn't a huge deal, as lucene is open source and tokenizers can be written, but I'm just highlighting it as a shortcoming that's illustrative of the time and place lucene evolved from.

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

#75

Post by sbarre »

strictnein wrote: post #56
avarun wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They might be referring to the one-time-rumored acquisition by YouTube, before Amazon actually closed the deal.

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

#76

Post by jsk2600 »

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 base your business on it.

* you have trust them with very sensitive customers data

* it is expensive. We reduced costs from $800/month to 40$/month by moving to self-hosted open source solution with same level/quality of customer experience.

* guys at Algolia like to rewrite client libraries and make them completely backwards incompatible. Good luck rewriting almost everything.

* support is incompetent and honestly it was useless in our case. I don't want to share details here in public as lots of people were involved in the case, but their support is disaster and for us that was major reason to migrate away. We had major issues for 2 weeks and in the end had to debug&fix problem in their client library by our developer. Long story, but that one was disaster.

In short, it wasn't extremely horrible experience overall, product is nice in general, but elasticsearch is very very good and Algolia just couldn't justify price tag, sorry.

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

#77

Post by arikr »

searchfaster wrote: post #63
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.. this is something our startup is working on fixing. How you sort and how you prioritize your fields to be searched are all configurable at query time. If you pay for a million records, you should be able to store a million records. https://searchera.io We are currently in beta and our website is not fully up but the demos give an idea of what is possible.

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.

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

#78

Post by searchfaster »

arikr wrote: post #77
searchfaster wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes.. this is something our startup is working on fixing. How you sort and how you prioritize your fields to be searched are all configurable at query time. If you pay for a million records, you should be able to store a million records. https://searchera.io We are currently in beta and our website is not fully up but the demos give an idea of what is possible.

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.

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

#79

Post by pcsanwald »

zigzigzag wrote: post #65
BjoernKW wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are you sure? I thought Algolia literally was Solr (which is ElasticSearch which is Lucene).

your comment is a bit confusing: both Solr and ElasticSearch are built on top of Lucene.

Algolia is _not_ built on top of lucene at all.

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

#80

Post by adjkant »

ekzy wrote: post #50
f_allwein wrote: post #3

Oh, 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

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.
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