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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

#81
post #28
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You just include a js file and add an input where you want the search and it just works(tm). Reading this I get the impression that they do the indexing themselves or something but in the Quick Start the first thing you need to do is importing your data. What am I missing?

@vjeux is using https://community.algolia.com/docsearch/ which is Algolia's community product that crawls technical documentation :) If you have any other usecase than technical documentation, we recommend indexing your data through the API. Ben

Is the identification of classes/methods/etc generated automatically or manually?

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

#82
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's indeed no OR, as you'd be able to type those three queries with instant results. If you really wanted to do that, you could use the optionalWords feature at query time using the API. :)

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

#83
post #64
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, especially if you have records that not even change often. If you have 300,000 items in an index that you want to sort in 4 ways and want to update eg the price daily, you already consumed 36 million operations of the biggest non enterprise plan that includes 50 million operations. Just by testing and tweaking the index every other day, we already use up to 500,000 operations. But then again setting up search in…

> we will never be able to achieve 20ms responses with eg an Elasticsearch cluster Why not? Assuming good hardware, why isn't that possible?

IME, I haven't been able to replicate Algolia's search responsiveness with ElasticSearch, even with good hardware. I don't think ES/Lucene was ever designed for that use case. IIRC, Algolia was designed to perform well even on mobile phones. I wouldn't dream of getting Lucene to run performantly on a mobile phone.

I'd love to see if someone has done any of the "realtime" Algolia demos backed by ElasticSearch.

In any case, ES excels at very different use cases - I've only seen Algolia provide "basic" search.

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

#84

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.

The response times are six times as long as with Algolia. I assume because of latency.

Will you offer distributed datacenters as well?

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

#85
post #62

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, especially if you have records that not even change often. If you have 300,000 items in an index that you want to sort in 4 ways and want to update eg the price daily, you already consumed 36 million operations of the biggest non enterprise plan that includes 50 million operations. Just by testing and tweaking the index every other day, we already use up to 500,000 operations. But then again setting up search in…

Totally agree with you. Algolia's speed is pretty amazing, but its price is pretty hefty also. We ended up switching over to Elasticsearch which is much cheaper and more flexible in certain ways

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

#86
post #84

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.

The response times are six times as long as with Algolia. I assume because of latency. Will you offer distributed datacenters as well?

Yes, we are currently hosted only in NY. Can you please ping beta.searchera.net and check the latency from your location ?

Once we are out of beta we will be offering distributed datacenters. West coast USA and Europe to start with. The option to install in your own servers / cloud provider is another option.

If you would like to try it out, I can always bring up a host quickly next to your location on digitalocean or aws. Please send me an email on hello@searchera.io

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

#87

This is great for something like a public website. What about a situation where I want some of my users to only be authorized to view some of my data based on a set of rules I set in my backend application. Can Agolia accomplish this? EDIT: Looks like they do support this.. https://www.algolia.com/doc/api-client/ruby/api-keys/#genera... However, I think for a small project it will probably be extra work to keep these…

You could just as easily set up Solr/Elasticsearch locally and index your data for searching. It'll give you the advantage of being able to do more complex queries, faceting, grouping, stemming, synonyms, and things that you expect from a modern search experience.

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

#88

I think that Adafruit uses them, too. What I notice with their results is that they start strong, but fall off very rapidly into partial gibberish. For example, say I want to make a battery-powered project. I search "lipo." The results start out promising; charging boards, including a few options tailored to specific popular boards. But by the time we get to the end of page 1, only every other result or so is actuall…

They're slightly prioritizing recall over precision: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_and_recall

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

#90
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The response times are six times as long as with Algolia. I assume because of latency. Will you offer distributed datacenters as well?

Yes, we are currently hosted only in NY. Can you please ping beta.searchera.net and check the latency from your location ? Once we are out of beta we will be offering distributed datacenters. West coast USA and Europe to start with. The option to install in your own servers / cloud provider is another option. If you would like to try it out, I can always bring up a host quickly next to your location on digitalocean o…

90ms from Europe

I signed up for your beta and will follow your progress.

Is your solution based on solr/lucene/elasticsearch?

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