Algolia

Algolia is a leading AI search platform that provides developers easy access to advanced search and recommendation capabilities. Algolia employs AI/ML technologies to personalize experiences and offers for users, and its Search and Recommend APIs help monetize new products, visitors, and infrequent visitors. Algolia's powerful and hosted search API offers incredible flexibility, blazing fast speed, and backward compatibility.

TLDR

Algolia is a powerful AI search platform that offers advanced search, recommendation, and analytic capabilities to developers. With its advanced AI/ML technologies, Algolia delivers personalized experiences and offers for users, and its API helps monetize new products, visitors, and infrequent visitors. Algolia's powerful and hosted search API offers blazing fast speed and backward compatibility, while its hosted recommendation API is flexible and easy to use. Algolia's distributed search network optimizes search performance, regardless of user location. Algolia offers four flexible pricing plans, ranging from a Free plan for development, testing, and experimentation to a customized Algolia Premium plan tailored to your business needs, and its comprehensive Developer Hub provides detailed insights and strategies to help achieve specific business goals.

Company Overview

Algolia is a leading AI search platform that enables companies to create instant and relevant search and discovery experiences across all their digital properties. The company's Search and Recommend APIs utilize advanced AI/ML technologies to personalize experiences and offers for users, even from their first visit and search. With Algolia, online retailers can move beyond content-based search to predictive, intent-based experiences, allowing them to monetize new products, visitors, and infrequent visitors like never before.

Algolia's powerful, hosted search API simplifies the ability to understand users' intent, providing developers with incredible flexibility, blazing fast speed, and backward compatibility. Algolia provides AI-powered search and recommendation solutions used by millions of developers worldwide, including top brands like Under Armour, Stripe, Slack, Medium, and NBC Universal.

The company's values define what kind of business it wanted to build, and its team members thrive outside of their comfort zone, pushing themselves to go ever further. Algolia values long-term thinking and exercises transparency within the company, its customers, and its community. The company fosters a culture of trust, helping each other succeed and going above and beyond to ensure that its customers, community, and colleagues are happy.

Algolia is a socially responsible company that supports non-profit organizations, diversity and inclusion, environment, and sustainability initiatives. The company is committed to female-male equality and has scored 86 out of 100 on the Female-Male Equality Index in France for 2022.

Algolia has offices worldwide, including Paris, San Francisco, Atlanta, New York, London, București, and Austin.

Features

Fast and Relevant Search & Discovery

Powerful Hosted Search API

Algolia offers a simple and robust API to build any search capability for various applications, be it e-commerce, media or any other industry. The API building blocks come with the flexibility of composing beautiful UIs, empowering any developer to build applications and drive business results faster. Algolia's search speed and relevance are unmatched, indexing millions of records in milliseconds, and customizing the relevance of the search experience with user behavior insights. It offers a unique set of UI components to design the perfect experience and lets developers launch A/B tests and search analytics via APIs or a user-friendly dashboard. 

Advanced AI Capabilities

Algolia's AI-powered search platform, Algolia NeuralSearch, helps developers build a natural and intuitive search experience. It automatically extracts and enriches website content, generates synonyms to improve search results, and curates, automates, and personalizes search experiences in a no-code environment. Developers can optimize the ranking of results for each search and use advanced front-end libraries, 14 API clients, and extensive documentation to quickly and easily build differentiated experiences anywhere.

Optimized for Mobile

Algolia's search API clients for Swift, Objective-C, Android, Kotlin, and C# help with the search implementation on mobile. Algolia has created iOS and Objective-C and Android UI libraries to help developers easily implement search interfaces on mobile. It ensures that the search experience is working always and quickly, making it better on mobile than on desktop. Algolia's API building blocks supported by flexible and scalable search infrastructure, composed of extensive SEO features and dedicated clusters, allow developers to build personalized search and navigation experiences for B2B e-commerce and shopping.

Distributed Search Network

Complete copy of the search engine

Algolia's Distributed Search Network (DSN) lets you automatically duplicate your search engine and data in multiple global locations. This is a complete copy of the search engine, including all the data, not just a cache. When users perform a search, their queries reach the closest data center, reducing the latency of the request. DSN helps ensure fast search performance all over the world.

Infrastructure and Indexing Capabilities

Algolia's search API infrastructure is designed to handle 1000s of indexing operations per second. Algolia's AI-powered search platform can handle indexing millions of records in milliseconds. Algolia's engine is language-agnostic: it supports alphabet-based and symbol-based languages, making it compatible with languages like Japanese and Korean. Algolia's index is optimized for search operations and records varied formats of data. For instance, in an e-commerce website, an index would be a total list of all products with a custom ranking.

Simple Implementation

Algolia's API documentation and extensive support team ensure that developers can implement Algolia's search API with ease. It takes 1 to 10 days for most of Algolia's users to have a fully functional search after sign-up. Algolia handles most of the heavy backend lifting, allowing developers to spend most of their time redesigning their website's UX. 

Flexible Hosted Recommendation API

Advanced Programmatic Control

Algolia Recommendation API is flexible, comprehensible and easy-to-use, with advanced programmatic control. Algolia Recommendation API enables developers to power shopping and the discovery experience, making it easier to recommend personalized content for varied industries, whether it's retail or media. Algolia Recommendation API provides a hosted engine optimized to deliver personalized recommendations in milliseconds. Developers can use programmatic rules and forward-looking signals for recommendation ranking and offer personalized recommendations with a full data picture, including user behavior and context data.

Easy Integration

Algolia Recommendation API is integrated with advanced e-commerce platforms such as Shopify and Magento, and flexible to integrate with custom e-commerce platforms. 

Insights and Optimizations

Algolia Recommendation API provides insights into search results for more informed optimization decision-making, unlocking new opportunities for personalized e-commerce strategies. Developers using Algolia recommendation API can guide users to the right content with personalized search autocomplete and optimize results ranking for users' queries. 

Developer Hub

API clients and integrations

Algolia Developer Hub offers API clients, UI components & integrations to build search & discovery experiences. The developer hub provides a wide range of integration options with various popular tools, keeping the user's choices open. Algolia API clients support popular programming languages like PHP, Ruby, Python, and many more.

Merchandising Playbook

Algolia's Developer Hub offers a free comprehensive Digital Merchandising Playbook with essential insights, strategies and best practices to achieve specific business goals from site search, including increasing conversion rates and average order value while curating search results.

Forrester's Total Economic Impact™ of Algolia

Algolia's search API proves to be an asset in the long run with a Return on Investment of 382% ROI as per Forrester Consulting's Total Economic Impact study on Algolia. The study found that Algolia's search speed, flexibility, and scalability offered significant business advantages over traditional search technology.  

Integrations

Algolia’s powerful, hosted search API and flexible hosted recommendation API are designed to create fast, relevant search and discovery experiences. These APIs can be integrated easily with your tech stack, platform, or framework.

API Clients and UI Components

Algolia has a range of API clients and UI components, which makes it easy to build search and discovery experiences. These components and clients are available in a variety of languages including Ruby, Python, Java, and PHP. This makes it straightforward to integrate Algolia with your current tech stack.

Advanced Integrations

With Algolia’s advanced programmable control, you can integrate Algolia’s recommendation system with your existing platform, framework, or CMS. By leveraging Algolia’s unified API, you can add a fully customizable scraping layer to adapt to your system’s specific data structure to enable features such as personalization or ranking rules across the scraped data.

Content Management Systems Integrations

Algolia’s hosted search API can be integrated with a variety of Content Management Systems (CMS) such as Wordpress, Magento, and Shopify. Algolia has created plugins and extensions specifically for CMS like these so you can enable fast, relevant search on your website without having to build everything from scratch.

Analytics Integrations

Algolia integrates with a variety of analytics platforms, including Google Analytics and Kibana, to enable deeper insights into user behaviors on your search and discovery applications. View metrics such as click-through rates and popular searches to optimize your search experience and content recommendations.

Third-Party Integrations

Algolia integrates with a vast range of third-party tools and platforms to enhance your search experience. For example, with Segment you can gain insights and engage with users based on their actions on your website. With Zapier, you can streamline workflows between Algolia and other apps.

Pricing

Algolia offers flexible pricing that fits businesses of all sizes. The company operates on a pay-as-you-go model. You can start with the free Algolia Build plan which offers up to 1 Million records and 10,000 Request every month for both the Search and Recommend products, no credit card required. Upgrade to Algolia Grow plan to release your project into production and share it with end users. Algolia only charges for data in motion, which includes data being searched and accessed by your end users.

The four Algolia plans include: Free, Build, Grow, and Premium. The Build plan is best for development, testing, and experimentation. If you need to host hobby and commercial projects alike in production, the Algolia Grow plan is recommended. Usage above the free tier is billed at the end of each month according to consumption. The Algolia Premium plan offers customized pricing tailored to your business needs.

The Algolia pricing model is straightforward. You pay $0.50 for every 1,000 search requests per month. For every 1,000 records stored, you pay $0.40, the storage quota scales with every plan. Algolia also provides volume discounts and support and performance SLAs for the Premium plan. If you're interested in the Recommend features, it is available as a paid add-on with a 90-day free trial. The additional paid features available with committed usage include automatically extract and enrich your website content, easily distribute your search engine on up to 17 regions worldwide, and protect your data with customizable IP restrictions, and encryption at rest.

If you require more information on how Algolia pricing works, their documentation provides an in-depth look at each plan, what is included, and the various parameters. Algolia's pricing is competitive when compared to other AI tool providers in the market. With the flexible pricing model, Algolia is a budget-friendly solution for smaller companies, and the premium plan is fit for larger businesses needing tailored pricing.

FAQ

What is Algolia?

Algolia is a leading AI search platform that enables companies to create instant and relevant search and discovery experiences across all their digital properties. The company's Search and Recommend APIs utilize advanced AI/ML technologies to personalize experiences and offers for users. Algolia provides AI-powered search and recommendation solutions used by millions of developers worldwide, including top brands like Under Armour, Stripe, Slack, Medium, and NBC Universal.

What products are supported by Algolia's Support Team?

Algolia provides support for all of its products, including Search APIs, Recommend APIs, Insights APIs, and Analytics APIs.

Is there a size limit for my index/records?

There is no limit to the number of records or indices stored in Algolia. However, the number of records and indices may affect search performance, so it's recommended to optimize them for performance.

How do I keep a connection alive?

You can keep your connection to Algolia's API alive by sending a request every 5 minutes. You can also use the event-driven client libraries, which handle connection keep-alive automatically.

Why is the nbPages not accurate for the virtual replica index?

The nbPages value may not be accurate for virtual replica indexes because the pagination is calculated based on the primary index's data, and virtual replica indexes may have different search results.

How do I browse or monitor the logs from my Algolia portal?

You can browse and monitor your logs directly from your Algolia portal. Logentries is an authorized Algolia log partner that provides an interface for monitoring Algolia logs in real-time. With Logentries, you can monitor your application's search and indexing performance, and troubleshoot issues more efficiently.

How does Algolia work?

Algolia is a hosted search engine that offers full-text, numerical, and faceted search. Its powerful API allows you to quickly and seamlessly implement search within your websites and mobile applications. Algolia is capable of delivering real-time results from the first keystroke by utilizing advanced AI/ML technologies to personalize experiences based on users' intent.

How do I create secured API keys?

You can create secured API keys by navigating to the Security section in your Algolia dashboard. From there, you can create secured API keys with different access restrictions, such as read-only or write-only permissions.

Do API keys expire?

Yes, API keys can be set to expire after a specific period of time, ranging from minutes to days. Expired API keys will not work, so it's important to ensure that you create a new API key before the old one expires.

How do I restrict application access to a limited number of IP addresses?

You can restrict application access to a limited number of IP addresses by using Algolia's IP restrictions feature. With IP restrictions, you can specify which IP addresses and/or IP ranges can access your application's data.

How do I hide my API key?

You can hide your API key by using Algolia's secured API keys feature. Secured API keys are encrypted and can have various access restrictions applied to them. This means that you can control who has access to your application and ensure that your API key is not exposed.

How do I fix Content Security Policy (CSP) errors on my site?

You can fix CSP errors on your site by adding Algolia's domains to your CSP whitelist. Algolia provides a list of domains that need to be added to your CSP whitelist, including Algolia's search domains, data domains, and analytics domains.

Can I have more than one Admin key?

Yes, you can have multiple Admin keys for your Algolia application. Admin keys have full access to your application's data, so it's important to ensure that they are kept secure and only given to trusted users.

Algolia provides powerful API tools for developers looking to implement advanced search and recommendation solutions on their digital properties. With its advanced AI/ML technologies, Algolia is capable of delivering personalized experiences to users, even from their first search. Algolia offers support for all of its products and has no limit to the number of records or indices stored. Keeping your connection alive can be achieved by sending a request every 5 minutes, and browsing and monitoring logs can be done directly from the Algolia portal or with authorized partners like Logentries. Algolia offers secured API keys with various access restrictions, including read-only and write-only permissions. CSP errors can be fixed by adding Algolia's domains to your whitelist, and multiple Admin keys can be created. Overall, Algolia provides a dynamic and effective search solution for both developers and end-users.