What Is Algolia?

Your users almost certainly use at least one of YouTube, Amazon, and Facebook. An essential feature that these big websites share is great search. The reason they have great search is because they have hundreds (if not thousands) of people working on it full-time.

Because your users are constantly exposed to great search on these platforms, they expect to find it on every site and application that they use. But your company isn’t a search company: it doesn’t make sense for you to hire a dedicated team of developers to reinvent search.

Algolia provides software and tools to help you implement efficient, flexible, and insightful search on your sites and applications.

What does Algolia do?

Algolia consists of two parts: search implementation and search analytics. The implementation tools make it easier for your developers to create and maintain great search experiences for your users. The analytics tools enable your business teams to analyze the impact of those experiences and refine them, so they can directly address your evolving business objectives.

Search as a feedback loop

Search has the potential to not only help your business, but also shape it.

To be clear, search doesn’t know the direction that your business should take. However, it can help you gather information on what your customers want, so you can better align your business with your users.

Imagine having a way of asking every single customer who walked into a physical store with all your products, “what are you looking for?” and recording their responses. This would give you a sense of what they’re actually looking for, what they’re not, and how both of these overlap with what you are currently providing.

Algolia lets you immediately start collecting this information on your users.

What can Algolia do for my users?

Algolia provides your users with a fast and rich search experience. Your Algolia search interface can contain a search bar, filters, infinite scrolling, query suggestions, sorting, refinements, etc. These help your users find what they’re looking for and discover new products.

To get a sense of the possibilities of Algolia, check out these implementations:

What can Algolia do for my developers?

Algolia provides a set of tools that simplify the process of making and integrating a full search experience into your sites and applications. These include:

• Back-end API clients, in many different languages, to index, configure, and manage your data.
• Front-end widgets to build web and mobile search experiences.
• Integrations with popular frameworks and platforms, to further simplify the integration of Algolia in your existing projects.
• A secure, distributed search network that hosts your content and serves it to your customers quickly.
• A transparent, customizable relevance algorithm.
• A heavily optimized search engine built, from scratch, in C++.
• Extensive documentation, implementation guides, and code examples.

What can Algolia do for my business?

Algolia provides a dashboard that lets you customize your search and view Search Analytics without any coding. The dashboard enables business and marketing teams to engage and customize the search experience of your users. With it, you can:

• Promote specific products or brands.
• Add personalization to your search.
• Test different search configurations.
• Get insights and analytics on user behavior.
• Get insights and analytics on your products.

More on insights and analytics

The analytics and insights data in the dashboard is incredibly detailed. You can view Click and Conversion Analytics: these tell you which products your users clicked on, and which products they purchased or liked. You can also see which searches are popular and which searches are returning no results. With a little configuration, you can also view these analytics for subsets of your users: such as those shopping from their phones, or from specific countries. All this data can give you a clearer sense of your catalog and your users.