
Ask HN: Is there any semantic search developed on top of Algolia? - agusgun
Is there any project that uses BERT to improve the search relevance of the Algolia search engine?
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dustincoates
(I'm on the team at Algolia that works on NLU and semantic search.)

I don't know of any community projects using BERT atop Algolia for semantic
search, but we have been experimenting with it internally. Earlier in 2020 we
ran some tests that first performed a search on Algolia, before using BERT for
the "semantic" side of it. We stopped those experiments for three reasons:

1\. The results weren't high-quality enough 2\. The predictions took too long
3\. We found other approaches that performed better

We could have probably improved the quality of the predictions, and there were
strategies we considered to avoid the issues around prediction time. But since
we had better approaches at the ready, we put further experimentation on hold.
(Apologies for being coy about the other approaches, but we are still working
on those and aren't sure if they will end up in production or not.)

I'm happy to answer more questions, or if you have something you're working on
that you'd like to discuss you can reach out as well. (Email is dustin@)

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agusgun
Hi Dustin, thank you for your answer. Is there any experiment using the
current search relevance evaluation dataset (bing queries for example) that
compared Algolia's search relevance to other alternatives? For example, in
this project [https://github.com/koursaros-
ai/nboost](https://github.com/koursaros-ai/nboost) they said the model can
boost the search relevance.

