Algolia is a proprietary search engine offering, usable through the software as a service (SaaS) model.

Company

Algolia was founded in 2012 by Nicolas Dessaigne and Julien Lemoine, both originally from Paris, France. It was originally a company focused on offline search on mobile phones. Later it was selected to be part of

Y Combinator Y Combinator (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch more than 3,000 companies, including Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Quora, PagerDuty, Reddit, St ...

's Winter 2014 class. Starting with two

data centre A data center (American English) or data centre (British English)See spelling differences. is a building, a dedicated space within a building, or a group of buildings used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommun ...

s in Europe and the US, Algolia opened a third centre in Singapore in March 2014, and as of 2019, claimed to be present in over 70 data centers across 16 worldwide regions. It serves roughly 11,000+ customers, handling 60 billion user queries per month. In May 2015, Algolia received $18.3M in a series A investment from a financial group led by

Accel Partners Accel, formerly known as Accel Partners, is an American venture capital firm. Accel works with startups in seed, early and growth-stage investments. The company has offices in Palo Alto, California and San Francisco, California, with additional ...

, and in 2017 a $53M series B investment, also led by Accel Partners. From June 2016 to September 2019, the usage of Algolia by small websites increased from 632 to 5,168 in the "top 1 million websites" and 197 in the "top 10k websites" evaluated by BuiltWith. In January 2021, Algolia acquired Romanian AI and machine learning startup MorphL. In July 2021, Algolia raised a $150 million Series D funding round and became a

unicorn The unicorn is a legendary creature that has been described since antiquity as a beast with a single large, pointed, spiraling horn projecting from its forehead. In European literature and art, the unicorn has for the last thousand years o ...

, with a valuation of $2.25 billion.

Products and technology

The Algolia model provides search as a service, offering web search across a client's website using an externally hosted search engine. Although in-site search has long been available from general web search providers such as Google, this is typically done as a subset of general web searching. The search engine

crawl Crawl, The Crawl, or crawling may refer to: Biology * Crawling (human), any of several types of human quadrupedal gait * Limbless locomotion, the movement of limbless animals over the ground * Undulatory locomotion, a type of motion characteriz ...

s or

spiders Spiders (order Araneae) are air-breathing arthropods that have eight legs, chelicerae with fangs generally able to inject venom, and spinnerets that extrude silk. They are the largest order of arachnids and rank seventh in total species di ...

the web at large, including the client site, and then offers search features restricted to only that target site. This is a large and complex task, available only to large organisations at the scale of Google or Microsoft. Algolia's product only indexes their clients' sites, simplifying the search task. Data for the client site is pushed from the client to Algolia via a RESTful JSON API, then the search box is added to the client's web pages. This search model is intended to replicate the advantage of a full in-house search engine but with a simplified setup.

Products

Algolia claims a number of advantages for their approach, including speed of response from searching a single site rather than the entire web. Moreover, as Algolia's search can be tailored to the client site, its known structure and its metadata facets, the search offered can be smarter and more site-specific than a generalised web text search. This improves the relevance of search results as searching may take the

semantics Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comp ...

of site content into account. A web site selling both

puppies A puppy is a juvenile dog. Some puppies can weigh , while larger ones can weigh up to . All healthy puppies grow quickly after birth. A puppy's coat color may change as the puppy grows older, as is commonly seen in breeds such as the York ...

and

dog clutch A dog clutch (also known as a positive clutch or dog gears) is a type of clutch that couples two rotating shafts or other rotating components by engagement of interlocking teeth or dogs rather than by friction. The two parts of the clutch are de ...

es could avoid the search confusions and

homonym In linguistics, homonyms are words which are homographs (words that share the same spelling, regardless of pronunciation), or homophones ( equivocal words, that share the same pronunciation, regardless of spelling), or both. Using this definiti ...

y that bedevil the simple text-based search approaches. Algolia emphasizes their ability to provide instantaneous, multi-platform and typo-tolerant features. Algolia's software is closed source. They do however contribute to the open source community to an extent. For example Algolia DocSearch, which provides free search for open-source documentation websites. Algolia's software is not open source code. It does, however, contribute to some extent to the open source community. Algolia Place and Algolia Document are two examples.

API

Algolia provides their search service via various APIs. The Rest API provides basic features of search, analysis and monitoring. There are 10 supported languages and platforms for client usage. Supported languages include

Python Python may refer to: Snakes * Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia ** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia * Python (mythology), a mythical serpent Computing * Python (pro ...

Ruby A ruby is a pinkish red to blood-red colored gemstone, a variety of the mineral corundum ( aluminium oxide). Ruby is one of the most popular traditional jewelry gems and is very durable. Other varieties of gem-quality corundum are called ...

, PHP,

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, of ...

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mos ...

, Go, C#, Scala. Two mobile platforms,

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also include ...

, Android, are supported. Algolia can be also integrated with four web frameworks:

Ruby on Rails Ruby on Rails (simplified as Rails) is a server-side web application framework written in Ruby under the MIT License. Rails is a model–view–controller (MVC) framework, providing default structures for a database, a web service, and we ...

, Symfony, Django and

Laravel Laravel is a free and open-source PHP web framework, created by Taylor Otwell and intended for the development of web applications following the model–view–controller (MVC) architectural pattern and based on Symfony. Some of the features o ...

. For user interface, Algolia has a few UI libraries options to choose from. Besides these products, Algolia also has integration with other open source and third-party software, including Drupal,

WordPress WordPress (WP or WordPress.org) is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) written in hypertext preprocessor language and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database with supported HTTPS. Features include a plugin architecture ...

and

Magento Magento is an open-source e-commerce platform written in PHP. It uses multiple other PHP frameworks such as Laminas (formerly known as Zend Framework) and Symfony. Magento source code is distributed under Open Software License (OSL) v3.0. Ma ...

Infrastructure

Algolia documented one attempt to remove all single points of failure in their architecture and proposed a worldwide infrastructure called ''Distributed Search Network'' to efficiently reply to a search query from any location. The DSN feature allows to set the locations in Algolia's network where the data should be duplicated. The API and queries are routed from the end-user's browser or mobile application to the closest location in the network. That setup helped reduce processing latency for the end users, and improves availability for their searches.

References

External links

*{{Official website, https://www.algolia.com/ Internet search engines Semantic Web Y Combinator companies Online companies of the United States Search engine software