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Algolia raises $110M for its search-as-a-service
- faceshapeapp 7y agoCongrats to the team! Although, am I the only one who finds that searching HN through Google gives better results than searching it through the Algolia powered HN search? For example, search "ml" in both, Algolia results are years old and don't seem that relevant, whereas Google picks up more recent threads.
- manigandham 7y agoYou can change the filters and ranking in the HN search page. I find it faster and easier than Google for comment content.
- j0e1 7y agoI have found their search interface for HN (https://hn.algolia.com https://hn.algolia.com) useful. They have a drop-down for selecting how you'd want to sort the results. From how I see it Google is doing more blackbox magic whereas Algolia is being a faithful/predictable search engine.
- Mougatine 7y agoProbably because Algolia isn't using yet any machine learning, but more old-school (yet still very good) tries-based search. And it's probably why also Algolia shines as search engine for a website vs searching the internet like Google. The former has a small scope (looking for videogames on twich, polo on lacoste) while the latter must be personalized for the user (the snake python vs the programming language python).
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dhruvkar 7y agoNot really. The sorting is based on popularity by default, which you can change. To compare: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=ml&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://www.google.com/search?q=news.ycombinator.com%3A+ml&oq=news.ycombinator.com%3A+ml https://www.google.com/search?q=news.ycombinator.com%3A+ml&o...
- GordonS 7y agoSample size of 1, but yes, I also tend to have better results using `query site:news.ycombinator.com` than using the built-in Algolia search.
- sdan 7y agoI do this sometimes as well when Angolia isn't giving me the results I'm looking for.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Redsquare 7y agoIt's only as good as the HN team have configured the ranking and other algolia settings. Be nice for them to expose these.
- atombender 7y agoPretty sure HN's search is implemented by Algolia themselves. It's served from algolia.com.
- Redsquare 7y agoYou cant self host algolia
- atombender 7y agoNo, that wasn't my point. You can't host the service, but you can self-host a site that uses it behind the scenes.
- redox_ 7y agoCorrect, and the source code is here: https://github.com/algolia/hn-search https://github.com/algolia/hn-search
- lettergram 7y agoIt all depends on what you’re trying to find when you search. Google knows your background, Algolia doesn’t. I too built a search engine: https://demo.insideropinion.com/meta_profiles?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search=Ml+%7C+machine+learning&order_by=expertise&order=desc https://demo.insideropinion.com/meta_profiles?utf8=%E2%9C%93... I find it works 100x better for me, when I weight results by my expertise. Basically, returning results based on what I already am familiar with.
- faceshapeapp 7y agoThe results aren't necessarily better because of the Google knowledge of you, because they are pretty good results even in Private browsing without being logged in. It just seems to me that HN search does a simple keyword matching and reordering based on points without any ranking (please someone correct if I'm wrong). So freshness doesn't seem to have any value, but the reality is that, at least in tech, very few content is evergreen. Also, when you try to reorder by date for example, you'll end up with a lot of empty threads which again are not that useful. I'm not sure if there's a way of eliminating empty threads from search results.
- lettergram 7y agoThey rank by popularity by default (up votes), but I agree generally their API doesn’t seem to do ranking.
- plnech 7y agoFWIW, Private browsing doesn't prevent Google to tailor results to what it can guess about you: https://spreadprivacy.com/google-filter-bubble-study/ https://spreadprivacy.com/google-filter-bubble-study/
- sniperjzp 7y agoIt feels ironic, I searched "Algolia" from both, today's news is ranked as #7 in Algolia powered HN. From Algolia: https://imgur.com/a/atRMnwj https://imgur.com/a/atRMnwj From Google: https://imgur.com/a/d3EKdUp https://imgur.com/a/d3EKdUp Some people says it's popularity based, but if I change it to date based, it's broken? https://imgur.com/a/HGzL6fO https://imgur.com/a/HGzL6fO
- faceshapeapp 7y agoSimply sorting by date doesn't really seem to be that useful either. For example, the poster below showed the following link for the "ml" query: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=ml&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... If you look at the results, the first 2 results only matched part of the poster's username and many of the top results here are empty threads which are not that useful since HN is mostly for discussions. To be clear, I'm not saying it's all bad, just pointing out that there are low hanging fruits which can improve results quite a bit. Also, Algolia seems misspelled in your query which is why it fails when reordering by date: https://imgur.com/a/pO9fBWr https://imgur.com/a/pO9fBWr, it works otherwise. Although, it says the date is 1 day old when it's just 2 hours old.
- sniperjzp 7y ago️ oops, a typo in the query, but why they have query correction for popularity based, not date based?
- redox_ 7y agoYes, when sorting by date it's currently configured to disable typo-tolerance. This is to avoid having an old (but approximative, like with typos) result BEFORE the correct ones.
- unityByFreedom 7y agoSort by date works fine. Your last search has a typo `agolia`.
- soneca 7y agoI prefer much more Algolia than Google for searching things in HN. The customizable stuff are very helpful -- search by user, by type, order stories by popularity or date, etc.
- newscracker 7y agoI came to this discussion just to say something similar. Algolia doesn’t seem to be great for HN, and off late I see it not loading search results (maybe something to do with my network, browser and the site) or being quite slow compared to say, Google Search.
- cjblomqvist 7y agoAnother data point: Have encountered the same problem.
- lolive 7y agoYou compare a generic solution vs a highly tuned mission critical search engine.
- Deimorz 7y agoOfficial blog post: https://blog.algolia.com/algolia-series-c-2019-funding/ https://blog.algolia.com/algolia-series-c-2019-funding/
- Game_Ender 7y agoTheir DocSearch program for open source projects is really great [0]. Check out the Jekyll docs [1] instant results that usually find just what you want. My only complaint is I want a plugin and play solution I can deploy for private internal documentation websites. 0 - https://community.algolia.com/docsearch/ https://community.algolia.com/docsearch/ 1 - https://jekyllrb.com/docs/ https://jekyllrb.com/docs/
- mlthoughts2018 7y agoI’ve always had a hard time understanding the value proposition in the same way I don’t understand the value proposition of e.g. AWS Rekognition. Paying per use certainly doesn’t make sense, because it has to be qualified by the accuracy you get per use. And there’s no serious way to understand the accuracy you get per use (on your specific unusual distribution of queries) without employing the expensive ML / stats engineers you probably thought you could avoid hiring by outsourcing to Algolia / Rekognition in the first place. But once you need to hire them anyway, you might as well utilize them to build this type of thing in-house in ways that are much more tailored and optimized around your in-house data models and data integration tools. To put in perspective, I’ve worked in several companies (from small start-ups to large ecommerce sites) that have a variety of search needs spanning plug and play Lucene all the way to highly customized joint embedding neural network based nearest neighbor search, and tons in between. The distribution of text in e.g. the support center search use case was totally different than the product search use case or the document store use case, where highly unique word distribution, special words, frequency of required updates to the search index, asymmetric costs of surfacing bad or deleted content items, etc., was the norm. Every search use case was different and needed care to develop unique annotated result sets to measure mean reciprocal rank, NDCG, etc., as well as simple stakeholder subjective opinion of quality. Short of basically hiring Algolia to be a gigantic consultant on all these things, I don’t see how it could actually be valuable. I suspect it’s just an easy sell to CTO types that don’t really understand. They want “search” to be one problem with one little component to drop in to solve it, but it’s just not real.
- apalmer 7y agoYou are absolutely factually correct in your analysis, but you are completely missing how business works. Fundamentally, there is value to most businesses in being able to just buy a decent solution to a non core competency. That’s where Algolia and AWS and basically all service companies come in... a medium scale clothing manufacturer with a booming e-commerce site may well know they have no clue how to do search, and no clue how to assess and hire individuals who could implement it, and no clue how to find and hire a cio who could put together a team from scratch who could do this on a reasonable timeline.
- tschellenbach 7y agoAmazing product and team. Nicolas still finds time to help small startups like us. Their success is well deserved.
- mjfern 7y agoWhat underlying tech does Algolia use? Elastic search?
- rajacombinator 7y agoCongrats to them but I find the product to perform quite poorly on HN. Seems to do some kind of fuzzy matching / weird relevance ranking and not full indexing when all I really want is a full index text search.
- sjg007 7y agoHN search should be parameterized by the user, where they've commented and what they've clicked on. The last part is why outsourced search performs poorly. They can measure what you click on in their search results but I doubt they know what you clicked on HN.
- cityzen 7y agoI figure with the ramped up marketing blitz they’ve been on we will be hearing about their IPO soon.
- goertzen 7y agoCongrats to the whole Algolia team. I can’t think of any SaaS business that invested in, and executed such a smooth onboarding and retention ecosystem. I’ve used them for small sites and large enterprise clients (10B+) and I’ve always felt like I’ve got way more than I’ve paid for. PSA: Algolia has basically hidden a category making/taking over strategy in plain sight.
- adventured 7y agoIt's interesting to see this valuation on search as a service, given the leader, Elastic, is in obvious valuation trouble. The market is unimpressed: the Elastic stock hasn't net moved higher since mid January (so most of the time they've been public). Just take a look at the actual business performance of Elastic. $271m in sales for the last fiscal year. Negative $101 million operating loss. Pretty bad, although not extremely unusual for SaaS companies in high growth mode. So there must be great growth going on, right? No. They added a mere $9m in sales last quarter. $89m in sales with a $42m operating loss (whoa). They added an additional $10m in operating loss and gained a mere $9m in sales. So if they can keep up that rate of growth, they might generously add $45-$50 million in sales this year. Maybe 16%-18% growth for a company bleeding red ink, that isn't particularly large in terms of sales yet (ie they're struggling to generate fast growth at a small'ish scale). And all that needs to support trading for 20 times sales on a business that is a decade old and has never produced a profit. Either they find a lot of growth soon or in the next market down cycle Elastic is worth 1/3 to 1/2 of what they're trading for now. The same will probably go for their lesser peers. The clock is starting to tick hard on these extreme valuations (hello WeWork, Uber, Lyft).
- 2arrs2ells 7y agoMaybe Elastic isn't growing because Algolia is eating their lunch?
- AznHisoka 7y agoelastic isn’t competing with algolia, imo. elastic is after the enterprise customers who have a mission-critical need for search (rather than a casual need like algolia users) but I think mission-critical search is a niche technical problem that isn’t applicable to many enterprises.
- donretag 7y agoElastic is not even after the search market, but the analytics/loggin/reporting sector. Of course, they are after every customer, but one Elastic rep told me that 75% of customers are not using Elasticsearch for traditional search.
- mc3 7y agoIncase someone doesn't know already: they have a HN search too! https://hn.algolia.com/ https://hn.algolia.com/
- a_imho 7y agosearch for e.g 'microsoft' -> ~120k results change sort by popularity to sort by date -> ~30k results I don't really understand how sorting can affect the number of results. Btw youtube search does this too.
- lukevers 7y agoMy guess would be that someone maintaining the main index isn’t maintaining the sorted indices. With Algolia, you have a duplicated index for each type of sort and direction that you want to support.
- redox_ 7y agoYes, when sorting by date it's currently configured to disable typo-tolerance. This is to avoid having an old (but approximative, with typos) result BEFORE the correct ones.
- mc3 7y agoAh the old multi-factor sort problem. Fun figuring out how to handle those scenarios in Elastic Search too (or more generally any sorting UI). For example you want traditional Chinese food near you. What is better - traditional Chinese food 14km away or fusion 2km away? Well that depends on the wetware, but you have to guess what the user would want.
- cloudking 7y agoAre there any good open source alternatives?
- im_cynical 7y agoI was just looking for a site search solution three days ago for a side project I'm working on. I found Elastic's offering but found the lack of a free tier(no 14-day trail crap) off-putting. I'll give these guys a try. Grats on the raise!
- orliesaurus 7y agoLong time since those days in a tiny office in Rue du Sentier with Efounders...congrats folks!
- rvanmil 7y agoDoes anyone know how MongoDB’s new search engine[0] compares to Algolia? [0] https://www.mongodb.com/atlas/full-text-search https://www.mongodb.com/atlas/full-text-search
- lovelearning 7y agoNot an exhaustive list, but important differences off the top of my head: - End-to-end search: Algolia's offerings span both front-end (InstantSearch drop-in widgets) and back-end (actual search API). Simple applications can be built without ever talking to Algolia API at all because their widgets do it for you. Atlas is all back-end - just a DB service with FTS on the side; left to you to integrate front-end. - Configuration: Algolia's dashboard GUI is where a lot of the configuration is done. Some configurations are not available at all via APIs. It's relatively simple. Atlas requires more JSON-type configuration entries, and some knowledge of Lucene internals. - Text analysis: Algolia text tokenization pipeline is mostly a black-box but works fine most of the time. It exposes only a few settings like ascii-folding. It's fine for normal dictionary words, but has problems with domain-specific text (for example, people/place names, scientific terms, etc). Atlas exposes many aspects of Lucene's analysis pipeline, but it does require knowledge of Lucene. - Multilingual support: Algolia supports all its features for ~70 languages. Atlas analysis has to be configured separately for each language. - Query syntax: Algolia defaults to simple queries but the API supports a more complex query syntax with boolean operators and such. Atlas has its own JSON query DSL that's related to Lucene's query syntax capabilities. - Faceting: Algolia faceting configuration and API are far simpler than Atlas's DSL.
- vast 7y agoSide question: how interesting and flexible is algolia as a replacement of a custom solr setup? I don't like the HN search and never heard that it is in use for larger data sets.
- redox_ 7y agoYou should give it a try; Algolia has a FREE tier you can play with. You can also watch this 45sec video to get a grasp of it: https://youtu.be/IYY5RM1sBC0 https://youtu.be/IYY5RM1sBC0
- sbmthakur 7y agoThere is a discussion on Stackshare(a bit old) about the tech they are using: https://stackshare.io/posts/how-algolia-built-their-realtime-search-as-a-service-product https://stackshare.io/posts/how-algolia-built-their-realtime...
- rwmj 7y agoI wonder if they can use the money to fix it so it works without Javascript?
- factsaresacred 7y agoIf you've ever tried installing ElasticSearch and then switched to Algolia you'll understand how great of a product it is. Now if Firebase could only buy them out and add decent search to their suite of products that would be swell. Mind boggling that Firebase - part of Google - still lacks a decent search solution.
- dennisgorelik 7y agoHacker News generates 86.10% of referral traffic for algolia.com: https://www.similarweb.com/website/algolia.com#referrals https://www.similarweb.com/website/algolia.com#referrals
- jmkni 7y agoNice work. The homepage is great from a developer perspective, select your backend on the left, frontend on the right, and you get an idea right away of what a basic implementation looks like. Very clever.