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January 22, 2014 01:20 am GMT

Algolia Provides Spotlight For The Web With Its Turbocharged Real-Time Search API

AlgoliaFrench startup Algolia provides a real-time search API that makes the search function on your website sexy. Now Y Combinator-backed, it’s faster than anything you’ve seen before — everything happens in real time, and results change with each keystroke. “We first started with an offline search engine that would work well on mobile,” co-founder and CEO Nicolas Dessaigne told me in a phone interview. “It worked but wasn’t a success. Many people wanted us to run the search queries on our servers, so that’s what we did.” Algolia is a developer-friendly hosted search engine for database objects. It will suit your needs perfectly if you run a sport results website, an e-commerce store, a movie database, a CRM, or any website that relies on small chunks of text (not big pages of text like Wikipedia or TechCrunch). Until now, there wasn’t any framework or API that was optimized for this kind of a database — Swiftype, Searchify and others all rely on big data-oriented Elasticsearch. The installation process is very reminiscent of integrating Stripe for credit card payments — adding Algolia’s search engine is just a matter of adding a few lines of code. You can see all that in thelive demo. But how do you get data into the search engine? Algolia works with JSON-formatted queries. After your first setup, you can update your data whenever you want. For example, if you want to order your results by the number of likes on videos, you can easily update those likes to keep your search engine up to date. Configuring takes a matter of minutes, as well, as Algolia already handles search and typos by default. All you have to do is say what attribute is the most important one. You can choose other ranking criteria, such as popularity, geolocation data, tags, dates, etc. After that, your users can start searching right away. They will interact with Algolia’s servers without ever leaving your site. With two different data centers in the U.S. and Europe, Algolia tries to make the experience as responsive as possible for its users. While the installation process is easy, switching to Algolia is mainly a matter of greatly improving the user experience. On most websites, search is a painful process. You don’t know what query you should type. When you hit enter, your browser takes you to a separate result page. Most of the time, what

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