Algolia, a popular search and discovery platform, provides developers with a flexible, ultra-fast, and reliable digital search and discovery experience with advanced features that are crucial for businesses. Algolia's API-first Hybrid Search Engine is capable of handling over 17K queries per second, with a latency of less than 10 milliseconds. Its platform supports various applications such as SaaS Application Search, Site Search, Digital Content Discovery, Enterprise, and Workplace Search.
The company has over 5 million developers using its services, with customers like NBC Universal, Gymshark, and many others.
Algolia platform, which offers highlighting and snippeting, faceting, accurate results, avoiding language bias, synonyms, multilingual support, geo-awareness, and advanced language processing, enables developers to provide their users with personalized and intuitive experiences. The company's robust search algorithm delivers fast and accurate results based on user input, contributing to its 99.999% SLA for enterprise customers and its API uptime of 100%.
Algolia has more than ten thousand servers globally and distributes data centers across six continents.
TLDR
Algolia is a popular and flexible search and discovery platform with advanced features, a robust search algorithm, and a Hybrid Search Engine capable of handling over 17K queries per second. Its platform supports various applications such as SaaS Application Search, Site Search, Digital Content Discovery, Enterprise, and Workplace Search.
Algolia's features include faceting, highlighting and snippeting, accurate results, avoiding language bias, synonyms, multilingual support, geo-awareness, and advanced language processing. The company has over 5 million developers using its services, with customers like NBC Universal, Gymshark, etc.
Algolia has 99.999% SLA for enterprise customers, 100% API uptime, ten thousand servers globally, and distributed data centers across six continents.
Company Overview
Algolia is a leader in providing globally scalable, ultra-fast, and reliable digital search and discovery experiences. Their platform offers powerful hosted search and recommendation APIs, which developers can leverage to create relevant search experiences with ease. Algolia's API-first Hybrid Search Engine is capable of handling over 17K queries per second during Black Friday, with a latency of less than 10 milliseconds, making it one of the fastest search and discovery platforms out there.
They support a variety of applications, including SaaS Application Search, Site Search, Digital Content Discovery, Enterprise, and Workplace Search.
The company provides a flexible, hosted recommendation API that comes with advanced programmatic control, enabling developers to customize the search and discovery experience according to their needs. Algolia has an extensive developer hub that offers in-depth documentation, code exchange, integrations, API clients, UI components, and other tools to facilitate the process of integrating search and discovery experiences on web and mobile applications. Algolia is trusted by companies worldwide, such as NBC Universal, Gymshark, and many others.
Algolia's success is largely due to its 99.999% SLA for enterprise customers, stringent security compliance with SSO, SAML, SOC2, SOC3, ISO27001 & HIPPA, and their 100+ data centers distributed across six continents. The company has more than 10,000 servers globally, and its API uptime stands at 100%. Algolia has a Forrester TEI report that shows a 382% ROI and a massive user base of over 5 million developers, making it one of the most powerful and easy-to-use APIs to build leading digital experiences.
Features
Global Language Support
Search and Discover Content in Any Language
Algolia's hosted search engine offers full-text search and discovery experiences in any language. Whether searching for content in English, Spanish, Chinese, or any other language, Algolia has you covered. Global language support is essential for today's businesses, and Algolia's platform ensures that customers are not limited by language barriers.
Fuzzy Matching for Accurate Results
To ensure accurate search results, Algolia's platform offers typo-tolerance and fuzzy matching capabilities. This feature allows developers to account for common typing errors and provide more accurate results for their users. Fuzzy matching is especially useful when searching for content in languages where accents, diacritics or punctuation marks are important.
Avoiding Language Bias with Morphological and Synonym Support
Algolia's platform goes beyond simple queries by providing advanced language processing techniques to avoid language bias by adding morphological support, ensuring that the search criteria won't discriminate based on grammatical gender or pluralizations. It also allows you to include synonyms in your queries based on language requirements.
Highlighting and Snippeting
Visualize Search Results with Highlighted Snippets
Algolia's platform offers highlighting and snippeting capabilities to dynamically generate snippets to display in search results while highlighting the search query enabling developers to provide more valuable content to users. This feature enables users to identify the most relevant information on their search in a matter of seconds.
Optimize Search Results for Mobile Devices
Algolia's platform is optimized for mobile devices, and highlighting and snippeting are no exception. With Algolia, mobile users can easily visualize search results and see what parts of a document match their query while on the go.
Customizable Snippet Length and Data
With Algolia's platform, developers can customize the snippet length and content, including contextualization of data, to meet the needs of their project. This feature is essential for creating user experiences based on what users want to see on their search results, providing them with a more intuitive experience.
Faceting
Filter Results with User-Friendly Faceting
Faceting is an essential feature for Algolia's platform, and it ensures users can refine their search results by attributes, such as location or type of content. This feature provides a quick search experience to find relevant content based on preference. With Algolia, developers can leverage faceting to create their own taxonomy and sorting systems.
Dynamic Filtering and Querying
Algolia's platform offers dynamic filtering and querying capabilities to create custom user experiences for various types of searches. This feature optimizes query processing to ensure faster and more accurate results while still providing users with flexibility in how they refine their queries.
Multilevel Faceting and Filtering
Algolia's multilevel faceting and filtering feature ensures that developers can structure and filter search results based on multiple categories, such as location, price, and brand. This feature offers much more granular control over search results and makes it possible for users to find what they are looking for more easily.
Synonyms
Improve Results Accuracy with Synonyms
Synonyms allow developers to improve the relevancy and accuracy of their search results by adding alternative query terms. Algolia's platform can identify synonyms within queries and match them with their relevant terms to provide more accurate results. This feature enables businesses to customize their search results to their specific needs and target groups.
Customizable and Programmatic Synonyms
Algolia's platform offers customizable and programmatic synonym capabilities, allowing developers to set up synonyms for specific terms automatically. This feature is important for businesses that provide services or products with specific language requirements or cultural significance. By adding custom synonyms, businesses can optimize their search results and provide an even more personalized customer experience.
Multi-Language Support for Synonyms
Algolia's platform supports synonyms in multiple languages, making search query processing more accurate for multilingual websites and applications. This feature is essential for businesses that provide services for global audiences and need search results to optimize for varied linguistic nuances.
Advanced Language Processing
Optimize the User Experience with Advanced Language Processing
Algolia's platform uses advanced language processing algorithms to provide users with more accurate search results. This feature can detect different writing styles, idiomatic expressions, and more - even in complex languages like Chinese/Japanese/Korean. Algolia's Advanced Language Processing capabilities take into account the specificities of each language's script and character set, providing customers with a more accurate and intuitive search experience.
Language Aware Filtering
Algolia's platform provides language-aware filtering options that are specifically tailored to each language being searched. This feature ensures that users see the most relevant results based on their search query, making it easier for them to find what they're looking for.
Semantic Search Capabilities
Algolia's platform's semantic search capabilities allow developers to provide users with more specific results. This feature enables algorithms to better identify user intent, even when the search query isn't precise. Semantic search capabilities make it more intuitive for users to find the information they're looking for even if phrased differently.
Geo-awareness
Location-Based Recommendations
Algolia's platform uses real-world location data to provide users with highly relevant and location-based recommendations. Developers can use location-based recommendations to find the closest store location or match the user with relevant information like weather updates. This feature caters to specific user needs and preferences.
Multiple Search Applications Based on Location
Algolia's platform offers multi-location search and discovery capabilities that consider the specificities of each location. By regionally setting up individual search configurations, developers can provide a more tailored and relevant user experience, catering to specific regional preferences and needs.
Geo Filtering
Algolia's geo-filtering feature allows developers to provide users with search results within a specified radius of their current location. This feature is especially useful for specific businesses like food delivery, which provides customers with a specific range of options based on their geographic location. Geo-filtering saves time for users in the search process, providing them with more optimized search results based on their specific requirements.
FAQ
How does Algolia work?
Algolia is a search and discovery platform that provides developers with the tools they need to create intuitive and personalized search experiences for their users. Algolia uses a robust search algorithm to deliver fast, accurate results based on user input. Developers can easily integrate Algolia into their applications using the provided API, client libraries, and integrations with popular development platforms like Shopify and Magento.
How can I speed up my implementation using Algolia?
Algolia offers a range of integrations and tools designed to help developers speed up their implementation process. These include client libraries and plugins for popular web development frameworks like React, Angular, and Vue.js, as well as pre-built connectors for popular e-commerce platforms like Shopify, Magento, and WooCommerce. Additionally, the Algolia Crawler allows developers to automatically fetch, index and search data from their websites seamlessly.
What is the Algolia Crawler?
The Algolia Crawler is a tool that developers can use to automatically fetch, index and search data from their websites seamlessly, making it easier for them to provide personalized search experiences to their users. It identifies itself with the following user agent: Algolia Crawler/xx.xx.xx, where xx.xx.xx represents a version number. You can allow this user agent in your robots.txt file: User-agent: Algolia Crawler without any version number.
How does the Algolia Crawler work?
When fetching pages, the Algolia Crawler uses a static external IP address: 34.66.202.43. If needed, developers can add this IP address to their allowlist. The Algolia Crawler's aim is to crawl content that is solely owned by the user, whether it's hosted on its own infrastructure or a SaaS provider.
Why is a page I want the Algolia Crawler to crawl not being crawled?
If a webpage is not being crawled by the Algolia Crawler, it may be due to any number of reasons, including permission issues, the webpage being excluded through a noindex meta tag, or other technical issues. To troubleshoot this problem, you can check your logs using the Monitoring and URL Inspector tabs. You can also use the URL tester in the Editor tab of the Admin to get details on why a URL was skipped or ignored.
Additionally, websites may behave differently depending on the user agent they receive, so you can use browser extensions or curl to send several requests with a few different user agents and compare the results.
What happens to skipped pages during index creation?
Pages skipped at addition time are not added to the URL database. This can happen if the page has been excluded through a noindex meta tag or if it requires a specific user agent to access it. Pages skipped at retrieval time are added to the URL database, retrieved, but not processed.
These pages are flagged as "Ignored" on the Algolia Crawler dashboard.
How can I save a backup of my index during crawling?
Algolia offers a convenient way to back up your index data during crawling. When you launch a new crawl, the state of your old database is automatically cleared, and your new indices overwrite the previous data. However, if you want to save a backup of your old index, you can set the saveBackup parameter of your crawler to true.
This ensures that your old database is saved before the new crawl starts.
What should I do if I encounter SSL-related errors while indexing my website using the Algolia Crawler?
If you encounter SSL-related errors while indexing your website using the Algolia Crawler, it may be due to your website's certificate chain being incomplete. To fix this problem, ensure that any intermediate certificate authorities signing your SSL certificate are installed on your server correctly. You can use OpenSSL to verify the validity of your certificate chain, or you can check online.
The correct method for bundling intermediate certificates depends on your web server, and more information can be found on the What's My Chain Cert website.
Can the Algolia Crawler discover links in RSS feeds?
Yes, the Algolia Crawler can discover links present in RSS feeds. It parses and extracts all tags present in RSS files. However, you cannot use the content of the RSS files to generate records.
The crawler only extracts links, for discovery purposes.
