What are degraded queries, and how do they work?

When you make a query to Algolia, but the server that receives it lacks the processing power to handle it, that query is marked as degraded.

We use degraded queries to increase the search capacity of servers during a request spike. This has little impact on the relevance of the first results, but a bigger one on exhaustiveness. What it means for your end users is that they still get relevant results, but not as many as they usually would.

Algolia directly handles query degradation; you cannot change the way it works or disable it.

Accessing data about degraded queries

You can get basic information on your degraded queries through the dashboard. Go to the Monitoring section and click on the Performance tab. There, you can find a graph of degraded queries. Note that you don’t have access to these graphs if you’re on a plan with shared clusters.

If you need detailed information, you can use the Usage REST API.