
Powering Twitch and Medium, Algolia (YC W14) raises $53M - losecontrol
https://venturebeat.com/2017/06/08/powering-twitch-and-medium-search-startup-algolia-raises-53-million/
======
vjeux
We're using Algolia (the free version) for all Facebook open source project
websites (React, GraphQL, Yarn, ...) and it's been nothing short of awesome.

You just include a js file and add an input where you want the search and it
just works(tm).

It has required 0 maintenance, it didn't go down, the api didn't change,
nothing to tweak on the backend... Users have gotten a quality and super fast
search since then.

I highly recommend it!

~~~
Kiro
> 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?

~~~
bndigne
@vjeux is using
[https://community.algolia.com/docsearch/](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

~~~
ipsum2
Is the identification of classes/methods/etc generated automatically or
manually?

------
omurphy27
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
descending respectively. Sorting by anything else, like price, means creating
yet more indexes and suddenly it's easy to turn 30K records into 150K. This
happened to me and I ended up having to roll something custom instead (Vuejs
frontend and Sphinx Search backend), since my client balked at the extra cost.

But, if you have a small dataset, or are fine with the costs, then Algolia is
spectacular.

~~~
naiv
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 infrastructure in different countries and
synching it in realtime also comes at a hefty price. So we will stick with
Algolia for now, the speed is breathtaking and we will never be able to
achieve 20ms responses with eg an Elasticsearch cluster.

~~~
rpedela
> we will never be able to achieve 20ms responses with eg an Elasticsearch
> cluster

Why not? Assuming good hardware, why isn't that possible?

~~~
nemothekid
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.

~~~
gibrown
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-...](https://stories.algolia.com/how-algolia-reduces-latency-
for-21b-searches-per-month-3959dc926f0)).

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...](https://data.blog/2016/05/03/state-of-wordpress-com-
elasticsearch-systems-2016/)

------
f_allwein
Oh, that's the Hacker News site search... Works fine for me, except I always
switch from "results by Relevance" to "Results by date", as in "Has this been
posted already...?"

Did not know Google is discontinuing its custom search engine. Looks like
there may be a business opportunity here.

~~~
ekzy
If you want to know if something has already been posted on hacker news and
are using chrome, I've made an extension for that purpose. It's a reverse
lookup that uses algolia search. It's not perfect but I use it daily and
solves this problem [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-
lookup...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-
lookup/ekfmfhhfalhmiacchemmhapffjaolffo)

Hope you find it useful

~~~
adjkant
Why does the extension need browser history permissions? I see it states it
does not use it, so curious what it's needed for. Cool idea regardless, just
curious.

~~~
ekzy
It's not used. I just need access to the current tab url and the ability to
open tabs, but I am not sure how to require less permission... The manifest
file looks like this:

    
    
      "permissions": [
        "tabs",
        "https://hn.algolia.com/"
      ]
    

See:
[https://github.com/jazzytomato/hnlookup/blob/master/resource...](https://github.com/jazzytomato/hnlookup/blob/master/resources/release/manifest.json)

Thanks for the heads up, I will investigate.

------
tlogan
Algolia is a great product.

However, the market is very very tough here.

The problem here is consolidation: all big customers (successful websites)
will end up being part of mega-corporations (Amazon, Microsoft, Google,
Salesforce, etc.). And all these companies have their own search engine (which
they use for other machine learning, etc. - not just search). For example,
Twitch will probably switch to Amazon A9.

So the question here is: what is the game plan to return this $53M?
Acquisition?

~~~
Spivak
I mean Twitch has been passed between two giants and they're still using
Algolia.

~~~
avarun
Two giants? As far as I'm aware, they've only ever been owned by Amazon or
private.

~~~
strictnein
Yeah, it was basically Justin.tv which morphed into Twitch and was bought by
Amazon.

~~~
sbarre
They might be referring to the one-time-rumored acquisition by YouTube, before
Amazon actually closed the deal.

------
leggomylibro
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 actually relevant. Useful results like
batteries and connectors are interspersed with random microcontrollers, LEDs,
motors, etc.

Still, it works and you can always refine by category if that sort of thing
really bothers you. It seems like a pretty solid solution, and the issues I'm
mentioning are probably caused by the implementation, which I'll bet uses the
full text description of entries to weight things towards not excluding a
potentially-relevant result.

~~~
alasano
Ideally you'll get everything you need in the first page anyways but generally
speaking if you have complex part numbers or product series, it's harder to
get right. I think that machine learning is essential to improve relevance
over time without having to resort to manual tweaks.

~~~
leggomylibro
Adafruit does have it tough; they try to bridge sites like Amazon and Digikey
by having a very broad selection of products specific to electronics, but they
don't actually have many parts in each of those categories. They focus more on
supporting what they have with documentation and software and whatnot.

But sites like Digikey/Mouser/etc have searching _down._ If I want a
capacitor, first I pick what kind (electrolytic, ceramic, tantalum, etc,) and
then I am presented with dozens of menus representing specific attributes that
I care about. Capacitance, temperature coefficient, size/pakaging,
manufacturer- whatever you could possibly want to select on, you can.

Sometimes I wish that other digital distribution platforms would take
inspiration from that 'catalog' model. Discovery is difficult, these days.

------
chrisacky
I've actually been avoiding using Algolia after I used IndexTank and then they
were acquired by LinkedIn. (I always said grats diego + team at IndexTank) but
it was a frustrating experience to need to role up everything and pack up
shop.

Seeing a huge raise like this actually makes me feel better about the
possibility of using Algolia rather than rolling my own Solr containers.

~~~
rhizome
_Seeing a huge raise like this actually makes me feel better about the
possibility of using Algolia_

Because...they won't be pressured to be acquired?

------
gregpardo
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...](https://www.algolia.com/doc/api-
client/ruby/api-keys/#generate-key)

However, I think for a small project it will probably be extra work to keep
these keys synchronized vs just doing a postgres search for my project

~~~
yannyu
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.

~~~
haroenv
All of that is out of the box with Algolia FYI :)

~~~
yannyu
Absolutely, I was saying the features were modern compared to PostGres search
:)

------
simplehuman
I definitely love the hn search which is powered by algolia. Fast and instant.
I wish it was possible to turn off fuzzy matching in some cases.

~~~
DanBC
There's a "typo tolerance" option in the settings that may help?

~~~
simplehuman
Oh wow, I didn't notice the settings in the top bar. Thanks!

------
lukeholder
Algolia is a fantastic service. I wish Elastic Search just as easy to populate
and then to search with a front end javascript lib.

~~~
bvm
I really enjoyed using [http://searchkit.co/](http://searchkit.co/) a while
back. If i were to do it again, I'd probably roll my own, as IIRC state
management with searchkit was a bit of a black box, but it is a pretty nice
drop-in lib .

~~~
lukeholder
Looks interesting, thanks for the link.

------
imjared
We've been using Algolia as we build out our custom database of ~1.5million
US-based nonprofits for patronage.org and I have become their #1 fanboy. The
search is blazing fast, super customizable, and support has been incredibly
helpful. It's one of those products that seems to provide "if you can dream
it, you can do it" functionality. We went from a slow search that used EINs to
a search that accounts for typos, alternative names of charities, EINs,
locations, and is customized for the logged-in user since we can pass queries
to Algolia clientside.

My only complaint, if I had to make one, is that pricing is a bit steep for
our use case but I can't imagine how much time I'd need to spend to get
ElasticSearch running comparably.

------
Houshalter
I miss the old HN search. The new one has some nice features, but it's missing
basic search engine commands. I used to do search stuff like "ai OR artificial
intelligence OR deeplearning..." to see if any articles on a certain subject
have been posted today.

~~~
maxiloc
Did you try: ai "artificial intelligence" deeplearning

~~~
Houshalter
Forgot the quotes but it doesn't fix anything. There is no supported "OR"
syntax or any kind of advanced search option.

~~~
jerska
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. :)

------
jamesfzhang
Algolia is an amazing product. I've used it on several projects over the past
few years and the performance & ease of use is top notch.

~~~
kwi
Same here, I started to use them very early on and I keep doing it now. They
are great everytime search or auto completion is needed, wherever it is.

------
atonse
Geez... Looking at all the praise from the tough HN crowd, I can only hope to
one day build a product that's so widely loved.

Kudos to the team at Algolia. Hope you're bathing in pride this week. Looks
like the praise is widespread and well earned.

------
wonderous
Guess I always assumed Algolia wasn't anything special. Anyone know what
exactly makes it worth so much?

~~~
BjoernKW
They are one of the very few companies in that space which still develop their
own search technology instead of just adopting and mixing available open
source packages. Most other search software these days runs on some flavour of
Lucene and rightfully so IMO because Lucene is a rock solid piece of software.

This means that creating a defensible USP in that space isn't easy. Algolia
did it by essentially developing their own search software from the ground up.
It isn't necessarily better than competitors like Elasticsearch in every
measure but it certainly has some interesting properties and it can be pretty
fast, especially for things like autocomplete.

~~~
zigzigzag
Are you sure? I thought Algolia literally _was_ Solr (which is ElasticSearch
which is Lucene).

~~~
BjoernKW
Yes, I'm sure. I talked to one of the founders about 2 years ago. Algolia is
written in C / C++ from the ground up.

------
jakozaur
Congratulations!

Algolia wrote some good blog posts, for example:

[https://stories.algolia.com/how-the-founders-of-algolia-
thin...](https://stories.algolia.com/how-the-founders-of-algolia-think-about-
scale-and-how-you-can-too-291a937d119e)

[https://stories.algolia.com/how-algolia-built-a-culture-
firs...](https://stories.algolia.com/how-algolia-built-a-culture-first-
company-around-ownership-eee6623b1b6)

------
papercruncher
My team switched to Algolia, and it's been a game changer for us. Great
product, simple yet powerful API and a really helpful team. We use it both for
our public facing properties (i.e
[https://tubitv.com/search/schwarzenegger](https://tubitv.com/search/schwarzenegger))
and also to power search for our internal video CMS

~~~
gdillon
Yay! It's great to be working with you all at Tubi TV. Love, your Algolia
account executive. :D

------
adarb
I am using Algolia with React Native and Firebase to search users by name,
bio, phone, and more, and all I needed was a single cloud function file in
Firebase to link the two completely after I had imported my data with a simple
node script.

Just their typo acceptance alone makes Algolia, imo, the best 3rd party search
service available currently.

------
stevoski
Anyone care to share positive and negative experiences of using Algolia to
power search in your SaaS?

(We're currently using MySQL's full-text search and are finding it to be a
long way short of the experience we'd like our customers to have.)

~~~
jsk2600
We've been using Algolia in production for 8 months and moved to self-hosted
elasticsearch. Small dataset, 2,5million records in 10 indexes IIRC, data
structures and filtering were quite complex.

Algolia Pros:

* very nice UI/dashboard, stats, lots of options, flexible

* documentation is nice, 'onboarding' was not an issue

* it worked reliably most of the time

Cons:

* lock-in/proprietary. Think twice if you want to base your business on it.

* you have trust them with very sensitive customers data

* it is expensive. We reduced costs from $800/month to 40$/month by moving to self-hosted open source solution with same level/quality of customer experience.

* guys at Algolia like to rewrite client libraries and make them completely backwards incompatible. Good luck rewriting almost everything.

* support is incompetent and honestly it was useless in our case. I don't want to share details here in public as lots of people were involved in the case, but their support is disaster and for us that was major reason to migrate away. We had major issues for 2 weeks and in the end had to debug&fix problem in their client library by our developer. Long story, but that one was disaster.

In short, it wasn't extremely horrible experience overall, product is nice in
general, but elasticsearch is very very good and Algolia just couldn't justify
price tag, sorry.

~~~
jlemoine
I am sad to see you had a bad experience with Algolia and I can assure you
that we put a lot of effort on backward compatibility:

* we have never discontinued a feature in the API since the launch

* We never broke our API clients, we proposed a new version when a new feature required a big change but we kept the previous version (and this happened only on two API client in 5 years)

For the support, this is our engineer's team working on the product that does
the support and we put a lot of effort to make sure all our customers are
satisfied and get the relevant answers.

Then if you got the same customer experience with a $40 machine, you have
probably not used all the feature/power of the engine. I am sad to see such a
feedback and you can make me accountable to make sure we will do everything we
can to satisfy all our users

------
kaelig
I love Algolia. I worked with them for a week to make DocSearch accessible to
screen readers and had a lot of fun. I'm especially grateful for their
commitment to open source. Go Algolia!

------
tschellenbach
Algolia 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.

------
sergiotapia
We use Algolia a lot at StackShare. Stack News[0] is powered by Algolia's
client-side library. It's easy to integrate in your project and runs really
fast. We love it! If you're looking for a way to add search for your project
give Algolia a shot, there really is nothing like it on the market.

[0] - [https://stackshare.io/news](https://stackshare.io/news)

------
ryanbertrand
Algolia is a great company! I am using their docsearch but my friend used it
in a mobile commerce app. He was super impressed with the integration and the
end result was a great user experience.

highly recommend checking them out. Congrats to the Algolia team!

------
strin
What 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.

~~~
gdillon
Yeah, definitely. It's a product category called, somewhat prosaically,
"enterprise search." Algolia's appropriate for this in that we allow you to
define data structures on a per-content source basis, and can show the most
relevant results for each content source. Usually, enterprise search providers
provide lots of out of the box connectors — with us, you'd just shove JSON
into the proper index using one of the API clients.

Security is super important, but we can provide encryption-at-rest and have a
secured API key [1] feature that allows you to segment your user base.

[1] - [https://www.algolia.com/doc/guides/security/api-
keys/#secure...](https://www.algolia.com/doc/guides/security/api-
keys/#secured-api-keys)

------
Fiahil
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)

------
trustfundbaby
I'm a big Elasticsearch guy, so when I ran across Algolia on a client project
I was skeptical, but they've been nothing short of awesome. I'm a fan.

------
misterbowfinger
Still blows my mind that Algolia is built on like, nginx

------
relyio
Algolia is awesome, but as others pointed out, the market is tough. I wish
them all the success they deserve nonetheless.

Allez les gars !

------
loceng
I've always wondered what rights they hold to your data, re: analyzing it,
trends, patterns, etc.

~~~
jlemoine
(CTO of Algolia here) We have just the right to host the service for you on
your data, it remains of course your property!

~~~
anotherfounder
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?

~~~
jlemoine
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.

------
aphextron
Does anyone know their tech stack? I assume it's just a giant elasticsearch
cluster.

~~~
jerska
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.

~~~
dzello
More information about the tech stack here -
[https://stackshare.io/algolia/how-algolia-reduces-latency-
fo...](https://stackshare.io/algolia/how-algolia-reduces-latency-
for-21b-searches-per-month)

------
sjg007
Awesome! Great opportunity.

------
searchtaway
Any comments on Swiftype and what this means to them ?

