What is ALGOLIA?
Algolia is a powerful search-as-a-service platform that provides fast and relevant search results for websites and applications. With its robust capabilities, Algolia is revolutionizing how businesses engage with their users and enhance their online experience.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
What is Algolia?
Algolia is easily one of the best search solutions on the market–with over 17,000+ customers across 150 countries–and over 1.7 trillion searches yearly. It offers full-text, numerical, and faceted search, coupled with powerful APIs for seamless integration.
Algolia is also startup-friendly–so you don’t have to be a large enterprise to adopt its search capabilities. It’s also developer-friendly, offering several resources for developers, including an engineering blog, documentation, and a unique code exchange page–that allows developers to use frontend and UI components built on top of Algolia.
Algolia also has great support for open-source and open-source projects–which is great for developers as well.
What is Algolia used for?
Algolia is primarily used to improve search functionality on websites and mobile applications. Whether it's a search bar on an e-commerce website or a search feature within a content-heavy application, Algolia improves UX by delivering fast and accurate search results–often within 100ms (according to the docs).
Who uses Algolia?
Since Algolia is a leading search-as-a-service platform–it's no surprise that large companies worldwide use Algolia for their search functionality. Let’s take a look at some of these companies.
Lacoste: Lacoste is a French company that specializes in selling clothing accessories and perfumes. Algolia helped the company upgrade its standard search result page and provided direct, as-you-type feedback, so whenever a customer searches the search box, they get results in less than 50ms. Read the case study.
Coursera: Coursera is a leading online education platform. Algolia helped the company achieve a higher level of search experience its former providers couldn't help them with. For instance, Algolia helped the company with federated search and highlighting snippets and tags in under three months. Read the case study.
Weight Watchers (WW): WW is a leading weight-management program that has helped millions of people lose weight and stay fit. Algolia used its custom ranking to tailor experiences based on individual user behavior, providing rapid responses to queries. Read the case study.
Why is Algolia a good choice for e-commerce businesses?
Better user experience: Algolia offers custom internal searches to improve the overall user search experience. It allows e-commerce businesses to surface products in search results based on factors such as purchase history, preferences, and demographic attributes of site visitors and customers.
AI-search: following the recent acquisition of Neuralsearch, Algolia now offers an AI-powered search tool–that uses semantic understanding to improve search result relevancy.
Type-ahead search: As we discussed earlier, Algolia's search engine is designed to deliver accurate results very quickly (within 100ms) so that users don't have to wait long for their search results. This is also known as instance search.
Autocomplete and Suggestions: Algolia's search capabilities include autocomplete and suggestions that improve the user's search experience. This feature is especially important considering that about 25% of website users click on autocomplete suggestions. It’s also worth mentioning the Algolia typeahead search functionality, which uses Autocomplete and the Algolia Instant Search library.
Increased product discovery: Algolia's search engine allows businesses to control the ranking of products in search results. Popular products that have positive reviews or high-profit margins can be placed at the top of search results–making it easier for businesses to promote their most valuable products and generate more profits. Its AI capabilities, like automatic tagging and categorization, improve the indexing and presentation of search results.
Reduced Cart Abandonment: Algolia reduces the likelihood of cart abandonment by providing more relevant and quicker search results. When customers can find what they're looking for easily and quickly, they're more likely to complete the purchase.
Core Features of Algolia
In this section, we will be dividing the core features into Algolia's advanced features and general features
Algolia Advanced search features
Algolia Neuralsearch: Neural search is a powerful search method that merges the efficiency of vector-based data representation with fast performance and the capacity for self-learning. To understand Algolia Neuralsearch, let’s first have an in-depth overview of this feature:
Combination of Keyword and Vector Search: NeuralSearch combines keyword and vector search–which allows for a thorough understanding of natural language and contextual relevance.
Understanding Search Intent: One standout feature of NeuralSearch is its ability to understand search intent–even in the absence of specific keywords. It does this by combining Algolia's full-text keyword search engine with vector understanding–all within a single API. This means that NeuralSearch can interpret and respond to queries in a more human-like, intuitive manner.
For example, if a shopper types in a search query for a product but the user doesn’t correctly spell the brand name, NeuralSearch can understand the shopper's intent and immediately suggest the correct brand product.
Analysis of Word and Concept Relationships: NeuralSearch understands the relationships between words and concepts. Let’s take an example of a shopper typing up “red dress” into a search bar on an e-commerce store. NeauralSearch understands the relationship between “red” and “dress” and suggests similar items like “red cocktail dress,” “red maxi dress,” and so on.
Association-Based AI Model: The end-to-end AI model behind NeuralSearch is association-based and is trained by user interactions such as clicks and conversions. This is cool because the AI self-learns to improve its understanding of users' continual queries–as well as refine the relevance of the search results it provides.
Algolia Keyword Search: Algolia's keyword search feature is part of its broader AI-powered search and discovery platform designed to enhance the speed and intuitiveness of content or product discovery on websites and applications.
Keyword search makes it easy for developers to utilize Algolia's powerful search API to create outstanding search experiences for their clients or company apps. With support for advanced front-end libraries, 14 API clients, and standard documentation, developers can easily integrate the Algolia keyword search.
Some of the interesting capabilities of Algolia search API include–website crawling, InstantSearch, seamless integrations, security, and compliance.
Algolia Recommend: Algolia Recommend enables the display of suggestions or recommendations on your website, motivating visitors to extend their search and consider a wider range of options. If users don't locate an exact match, they can explore items that are either similar or supplementary. In this case study, a Polish toy company Noski Noski, used Algolia Recommend to help parents find the “perfect” toy for their kids in a sea of 8-10k products. Let's explore the key aspects of Algolia Recommend:
AI-Optimized Recommendation Models: Algolia Recommend uses machine learning models to generate recommendations based on shopper behavior (such as actions on a website or app) and product data (like product attributes in a catalog). This data is processed using Machine Learning models to surface the most relevant recommendations, offers, or suggestions for shoppers in milliseconds.
Ease of Integration and Usage: One of the distinguishing features of Algolia Recommend is its simplicity in integration, requiring as little as six lines of code. This ease of use is attributed to its API-first approach, contrasting with the complexity of building a custom recommendation engine or the limitations of pre-packaged solutions.
Collaborative filtering and content-based filtering: Algolia recommends using two types of algorithms; collaborative filtering (analyzes user events from the last 30-80 days) and content-based filtering (analyzes key item attributes, such as titles, descriptions, etc). See documentation.
General Features
Here, let's look at some of Algolia's general features.
Algolia Merchandising Studio: The Algolia Merchandising Studio is an AI-powered tool in Algolia that allows businesses to quickly create and adjust merchandising plans–all from an intuitive user interface and dashboard. The Merchandising Studio is used to:
Merchandise Search results
Merchandise category pages
Set up search keyword redirects
Gain valuable insight through analytics
Advanced search options: Algolia has advanced search options worth knowing about. Some include:
Synonyms: Algolia supports synonym management. This means the search engine can recognize different terms or phrases that mean the same thing.
Multi-Sorting Strategies: Algolia allows for multiple sorting strategies. Users can sort search results based on different criteria, such as relevance, price, popularity, or any other custom metric relevant to the application.
Typo Tolerance: Algolia's search engine is designed to handle typographical errors in search queries–users can still find relevant results even when they misspell words.
Multilingual Support: Algolia can handle searches in multiple languages–this is great for e-commerce businesses looking to expand globally.
Analytics: Algolia’s analytics provide deep insights into user interactions post-search. This out-of-the-box analytics feature helps vendors have a closer look into the actions users take after performing a search. You can find the Analytics feature right on your Algolia dashboard.
A/B Testing capabilities: Algolia's A/B Testing capabilities are integrated into its platform and can be accessed through the Algolia Dashboard or programmatically via a dedicated API. This feature allows for the fine-tuning, testing, and measurement of new strategies with confidence.
Support
Algloia provides extensive support for developers through its comprehensive documentation. Although there have been reports of confusing documentation, it still helps answer most questions developers might ask. Algolia has a dedicated “contact support” page, so it's easy to send your query. The platform also comes with a plethora of resources, including blogs, e-books, user guides, and more.
Pricing
Algolia offers pay-as-you-go or committed plan pricing. The “Build” plan lets you get started with Algolia for free(10k search requests/month). The “Grow” plan starts out at $0.50/1k searches /mo. To use the “Premium” and “Elevated” plans, you have to contact the sales team by clicking “Request pricing.” See the pricing page for more details.
WHAT DO USERS SAY?
Conclusion
This article discussed Algolia's interesting features, from its Neural search feature to its powerful autocomplete and typeahead search capabilities. Algolia constantly updates its features–you learn about these new features in the Algolia changelog.
To learn more about implementing these solutions, feel free to reach out to us at Hamari Agency.
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