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Comment by anxrn | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand what makes this particular service tout 'realtime' as its primary selling point.

Don't all search engines (and other hosted search services) aim for fast (100s of milliseconds) retrieval, show-as-you-type and realtime indexing?

Don't get me wrong. Getting all this right is very hard, and kudos for the great performance numbers (vs Elasticsearch), but 'realtime search' smacks of marketing copy.

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You can try to search-as-you-type on our hacker news search to see the difference with other search engines: http://hn.algolia.com/

You have relevant results after each keystroke, even with typos. Classical engines use approximation to perform instant search, like the suggest module of Elasticsearch.

It seems like for the HN search, your ranking function is the number of votes (or very highly correlated with it). If this is true, its not solving a problem as hard as 'classical' engines, which compute a lot more. It would be great to demonstrate this sort of performance on comparable rank functions. I don't know anything about Elasticsearch ranking though, maybe they have a very simple rank function too.

It is more than just a sort on number of points :) Our value is to be able to mix textual relevance with business data (in that case the number of points but is can be the number of page views, number of followers, ...).

You can have a look at our blog post which explain our ranking in details: http://blog.algolia.com/search-ranking-algorithm-unveiled/

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