What Does Algolia do?

Google's search engine, but for everyone

This is a guest post from Sachit Bhat, an engineer at my old employer, Retool.

The TL;DR

Algolia provides a set of tools that helps engineers build search functionality into their apps. Think: literal search bars.

• Many of the most commonly visited websites (think Amazon, Netflix, Youtube, Lululemon) are dependent on a frictionless search experience

• Search is based on crawling and indexing your data, kind of like the index in the back of a book

• Building search and discovery from scratch is complicated and requires a good degree of specialized expertise

• Algolia provides ‘search as a service’ through a suite of developer tools, plus a dashboard to configure settings and track usage

Algolia claims almost 2T searches a year and 17,000 customers, so it’s definitely a company worth diving into.

How Does Search Actually Work?

To understand how you outsource search for your app, we must first understand what search is in the first place. Let’s take the example of Google Search, a small search engine you may have heard of.

Most search is reliant on a concept called indexing. If you’ve ever scoured a large scientific textbook, you may have skipped to the end index to find the keywords you needed before flipping back to the associated pages. The same principle applies on the web. Google maintains an index (think, database) with relevant information on most web pages.