I am about to roll out search on Shepherd.com and looking at using Algolia. I've been impressed with Algolia on Hacker News...
Is anyone else using them? What are your impressions so far?
Much appreciated
Is anyone else using them? What are your impressions so far?
Much appreciated
Algolia is a great product but can get quite expensive at even moderate scale. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard this from Algolia users switching over…
I recently put together this comparison page, comparing a few search engines, including Algolia, you might find interesting: https://typesense.org/typesense-vs-algolia-vs-elasticsearch-...
I was thinking about adding a row about speed to the comparison matrix, but couldn't find a way to express the comparison clearly... Imagine a row that said:
Search Speed | Super-fast | Super-fast | Slow? ...
That felt a little off. So I resorted to just mentioning primary index location as a proxy.
Open to suggestions on how to express this succinctly.
I've had great success at a client where simply upgrading a DB to an instance with enough RAM to fit 80% of the entire data set fixed all performance problems and significantly reduced I/O "pressure" at least for reads (writes were never a problem).
But one thing I would add is ElasticSearch is quite versatile and flexible, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you can contort it to get it to work for a wide variety of use cases. This is a blessing and a curse - blessing because it’s so flexible, curse because the flexibility breeds complexity and brings with it a steep learning curve and operational complexity.
Where I think Algolia / Typesense help is that things work out of the box without the learning curve or operational overhead.
Does it OOM?
Commercially available RAM today goes all the way to 24TB these days, which should be sufficient for a good number of search use cases. Beyond that you’d have to shard data across multiple clusters.
Similarly with Algolia, they use 128GB RAM clusters, and recommend you keep your Algolia index size below 100GB: https://www.algolia.com/doc/guides/sending-and-managing-data...
We don’t have comparative relevancy benchmarks. But we fo have performance benchmarks here: https://typesense.org/docs/overview/benchmarks.html
> Exact Keyword Search ("query")
Any plans on adding it in future?
In the meantime, we introduced a way to turn off typo tolerance and prefix-search on a per-field basis. This has helped some users search for fields containing model numbers for eg.
worth giving a look
Algolia is great to get started but it doesn't make sense at scale. If you have large indexes it's just too expensive.
Really happy with the service it provides and the ease of implementation. Note that because the docs can take a few seconds to load, the their crawler times out and misses some content some of the time. With better page performance this should not be an issue.
(We are actively working on some cool ideas to make Lowdefy apps super fast)
One of our goals is similar to yours: browsing an online store should be like walking around in a physical store. The navigation system on the site should be as adept as a knowledgeable store employee in helping you find exactly what you're looking for.
At Loop54 many of our customers come from Algolia. It's very popular, and nobody ever gets fired for buying Algolia. In that sense, it's a safe option.
On the other hand, customers come to us from Algolia because Algolia requires a bit of hand-holding and it still doesn't quite seem to get what users are really looking for. When our prospects run randomised controlled trials, our search consistently seems to give users what they want better than Algolia does, with less effort. I can ask about specific numbers if you want.
However, another strength of Algolia that Loop54 is currently behind in is in the surrounding tooling. For better or worse, with Algolia, you'll have more knobs and levers to play with (and you'll need them much more often!)
We do have one or two customers that have a majority of books in their product catalogues, and we know there are some unique challenges that come with that domain.
Loop54 is a very competent, but smaller player. If you think it's interesting, it's worth talking to us. I can't evaluate how good a fit your site would be for us, but that's why we have people who do that for a living!
Edit: I should also say that yes, Loop54 is even more expensive. You shouldn't blindly trust us (or any other provider.) I would strongly suggest running a randomised controlled trial to see whether any expense at all is worth it in your case.
I say this in part because I'm a man of science and believe in experiments to measure things, but also out of self-interest; anyone can throw out impressive marketing, but our search truly shines when put to the test against the alternatives.
The TL;DR is that we're offering customers more flexibility than the tiered model suggests. Consequently there's a large variability in what customers pay. A number on the pricing page turned out to be more misleading than helpful for our target audience.
The long-term solution is creating a more flexible pricing model that can be very transparent. We are working on that. (Though as you know, generic, modular solutions take a while to get just right, unfortunately.)
We didn't think a short-term solution was needed, but based on your comment, that might be worth reconsidering. The best I can think of is a 90 % range of what customers actually end up paying for each tier. What suggestions do you have?