Congratulations are in order ! I guess they're finally moving out of their Rivoli offices ! ;)
(their Paris desk is located virtually across the street, but it's not so great)
Powering Twitch and Medium, Algolia (YC W14) raises $53M
91–100 of 111 posts
Re: Powering Twitch and Medium, Algolia (YC W14) raises $53M
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Algolia has done some terrific work on search latency (and written about it which is awesome https://stories.algolia.com/how-algolia-reduces-latency-for-...).
I think ES can get there, but depends a lot on what hardware you deploy (SSDs!), how you build your index, and whether you can geographically distribute your search engine close to your users.
We have one ES cluster with hundreds of queries per second that gives median 9ms response times and 99th percentile around 160ms. Another cluster with 100x more data that gets 20-25ms median response times and 99th percentile at 360ms.
Now both of these are just the ES response time, there is additional overhead in responding to an API request and then you also start to get into where your data centers are located relative to the end users.
More (slightly out of date) background on our config: https://data.blog/2016/05/03/state-of-wordpress-com-elastics...
Re: Powering Twitch and Medium, Algolia (YC W14) raises $53M
#93I've always wondered what rights they hold to your data, re: analyzing it, trends, patterns, etc.
(CTO of Algolia here) We have just the right to host the service for you on your data, it remains of course your property!
Any thoughts on all the comments around steep pricing because of needing to add a sort, or test? Sounds like a bait and switch as the rise in cost is quite unexpected for most people?
Re: Powering Twitch and Medium, Algolia (YC W14) raises $53M
#94Earlier 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…
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Re: Powering Twitch and Medium, Algolia (YC W14) raises $53M
#95Does 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.
More information about the tech stack here - https://stackshare.io/algolia/how-algolia-reduces-latency-fo...
Re: Powering Twitch and Medium, Algolia (YC W14) raises $53M
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Ours is a custom index written mostly in 'C' and bit of x86 assembly. It is very lightweight and extremely fast even without the use of replica indexes for every sort order.
Thanks for signing up.. Will get you started as soon as we have our additional servers up.
Re: Powering Twitch and Medium, Algolia (YC W14) raises $53M
#97What 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.
Algolia isn't in this space, but there are definitely companies that are solving this. Swiftype comes to mind.
Re: Powering Twitch and Medium, Algolia (YC W14) raises $53M
#98Does 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.
Cool, thanks. Good to know they've got some special sauce.
Re: Powering Twitch and Medium, Algolia (YC W14) raises $53M
#99Algolia is amazing. They are growing like crazy and somehow they still have time to help out startups. Both the CEO and CTO have been giving us advice. Great guys, amazing tech.
Re: Powering Twitch and Medium, Algolia (YC W14) raises $53M
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
(CTO of Algolia here) We have just the right to host the service for you on your data, it remains of course your property!
Any thoughts on all the comments around steep pricing because of needing to add a sort, or test? Sounds like a bait and switch as the rise in cost is quite unexpected for most people?
For testing, we propose free accounts.
For the different sort, we did the choice to emphasis quality over cost, on purpose :)
In practice, it means we need to duplicate the data for each sort in order to do has much as possible at indexing time. We have seen few users that were not ready to pay but the big majority see the value and this is aligned with our cost.