Guess I always assumed Algolia wasn't anything special. Anyone know what exactly makes it worth so much?
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.
Lucene is great, but, it does have limitations: tough to embed in non-JVM applications and poor support for tokenizing things like emojis are two immediate things that come to mind.
Elasticsearch is maybe my favorite data storage product in the last 15 years, but the Algolia folks have taken a different approach that is also quite interesting.
Algolia is _not_ built on top of lucene at all.
Indexes are easy to setup, maintain, and SDK's support a variety of languages. Querying is fast enough to feel seamless.
We have been working on a more flexible alternative with additional features and also have a few current Algolia customers who are trying it in beta. The number one feedback has been how easy it is to get started with Algolia..