Trading up: Implementing Algolia search to improve the trading card experience

Are you familiar with trading card games (TCG) like Yu-Gi-Oh!? The Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game is a Japanese collectible card game based on the Duel Monsters card game popularized from the manga franchise, Yu-Gi-Oh!. The goal of this trading card game ... more

Using NetInfo API to Improve Algolia’s JavaScript Client

Algolia’s architecture is heavily redundant, hosting every application on at least three different servers (called clusters). We do this to ensure the greatest possible reliability. This underpins our SLA, ensuring a 99.99(9)% uptime, allowing you to ... more

DX Matters – Creating Great Search for Documentation

D eveloper e X perience, known as DX , is key to building great software, as it helps your developer-users leverage the best out of your software. Part of good DX is searching through documentation, not only as a means to finding information, but also ... more

Built for The Now Economy — Algolia Summer ‘19

Consumers today want instant, frictionless Google- and Amazon-like experiences when looking for information, media content and products. They demand intuitive experiences that deliver exactly what they are looking for — regardless of the digital interface ... more

Search Party #18 — Crawling Edition

We were happy to organize our regular Search Party last Wednesday, June 12th, 2019. This time it was about crawling web content. People tend to think crawling is about stealing other people’s data. Although some crawlers do that, crawling itself is simply ... more

How Algolia Helped Us Improve UX, Dump Legacy Code and 4x Engagement

When I stumbled across Algolia years ago, I knew it was going to be incredible for my business, MyCreativeShop.com. As a small business owner, increasing efficiency is very important to me. I knew that Algolia could take work off my plate and do it better ... more

Redesigning our Docs – Part 7 – What’s next to come

This is the last article in a seven-part series of blogs that describe our most recent changes to the architecture and content of our documentation. We focus here on our next steps. When we hit the “Deploy” button last December and went live with the ... more

Deep Diving into Vue InstantSearch Version 2

This post was made collaboratively with Bram Adams. In the previous post we announced the release of our 2.0 library for Vue Instant Search. That post introduced us to the new features included in the release. This time we’d like to take a deeper look ... more

Redesigning Our Docs – Part 5 – Building an Interactive InstantSearch Showcase

This is the fifth article in a seven-part series of blogs that describe our most recent changes to the architecture and content of our documentation. We focus here on CSS architecture and improving the way we deal with assets. A search interface is like ... more

Redesigning Our Docs – Part 4 – Building a Scalable CSS Architecture

This is the fourth article in a seven-part series of blogs that describe our most recent changes to the architecture and content of our documentation. We focus here on CSS architecture and improving the way we deal with assets. When working on a documentation ... more

The Challenging Migration from Heroku to Google Kubernetes Engine

The Challenging Migration from Heroku to Google Kubernetes Engine The simplicity of Heroku, for a team consisting only of developers, made it easy for us to get our prototype into production. However, as our product matured and customer expectations grew, ... more

The journey to better DX: Create InstantSearch App

InstantSearch by Algolia is a family of frontend libraries to create search UIs on top of Algolia APIs. Today, we’re introducing Create InstantSearch App : a command-line interface (CLI) to bootstrap InstantSearch applications from the terminal . All ... more

Inflect + Algolia: Modernizing the Buying of Infrastructure Products

Inflect is the only global, neutral online marketplace for the buying and selling of internet infrastructure products. Inflect’s goal is to make the process as easy as it is to book a hotel or airline ticket. Inflect attributes its ability to deliver ... more

Supporting the Open Source Software that makes us Great

At Algolia many of us are working with, contributing to, or benefitting from open source projects on a daily basis. We’re all about the tools that help us to get the job done, and get it done right. Yet the majority of the software that we’re using to ... more

Bringing Search to Angular

Today, we are excited to launch Angular InstantSearch — our newest library for easily creating search UIs in Angular applications. Our mission at Algolia is to make sure any website or application has the best search experience. But search is its own ... more

What Can’t React Do?

Algolia Search Party is a monthly Meetup we organize around a common theme that makes fellow devs’ lives easier. Topics have included Laravel, static websites and, this month, React and some cool things you can do with it. Since the talks were useful ... more

New features, new docs and a new foundation for Algolia’s Jekyll plugin

We’re proud to announce the new release of our Jekyll plugin, jekyll-algolia. Jekyll is the best-known static website generator, converting raw markdown content to beautiful HTML pages. This plugin helps developers make their Jekyll sites searchable. ... more

Start your open-source career

This year I gave a talk about how to make open-source projects successful by ensuring everything is in place to attract all kinds of contributions: issues, documentation or code updates. After the talk, the feedback I got was “It’s nice, you showed how ... more

Pragmatic Releasing: Less Worry, More Shipping

Here I’ll share a few things I’ve learned managing libraries at Algolia. They are by no means a perfect set of instructions or recommendations, but tips for making your (developer) life easier. Here are some good signs that you may want to re-work your ... more

Comparing Algolia and Elasticsearch for Consumer-Grade Search Part 3: Developer Experience and UX

According to its 2017 State of the Octoverse report, Github now hosts more than 25 million active public repositories. Many of these projects are tools made by developers for developers, and being able to search through the masses and find exactly the ... more

Yarn: From Zero to 700,000 User Searches per Month

Since December 2016, as part of our yearly community gift effort, Algolia has powered the JavaScript packages search of the Yarn website. This blog post explains how we collaborated with the Yarn team, what the challenges were building such a search ... more

Building an App That Gives Music Advice Through a Conversation

What would a search interface without a search box look like? After a few weeks of exploration, I created an app that gives music advice through a conversation, and called it “Musicologist”. This is the story of how I built it, hoping to give you an ... more

Introducing “We Rate Tweets” — a Glitch App for Searching Your Twitter Timeline

Glitch, the latest project by creators of Trello, FogBugz and co-creators of Stack Overflow, is a new platform for building web applications that features online code editing and instant deployment. In this post, you’ll learn how to use Glitch to host ... more

We Built an Atom Plugin to Find and Install Any NPM Module

The desire to automate everything is pretty common, especially with developers: why should I waste my time doing the same operation countless times? That desire is at the base of the process that led to the making of our Atom plugin: an autocomplete ... more

Serving One Billion JavaScript Library Downloads

This month, with the help of jsDelivr, we reached a milestone 1 billion downloads (that’s 26TB!) across all of our libraries. Since we now know how to deliver that many JavaScript libraries in a fast, robust and stable way, we thought we’d share our ... more

6 Tips to Make the Most of a Hack Day

When I joined Algolia, the InstantSearch team was composed of two developers. Ten months later, we doubled the team and will have two more engineers joining us soon. We are now focusing on several big projects at the same time. Even though we are a single ... more

Bringing the Missing Frontend Search Block to the Laravel Vue.js Community

Last year, Taylor Otwell, the maker of Laravel, decided to create an official Laravel package named Scout. The package allows Laravel users to add full-text search on top of their existing database without much effort. I was very happy to notice that ... more

Performant Web Animations and Interactions: Achieving 60 FPS

Silky smooth interactions are critical for providing a natural-feeling application. The devil is in the details, and ill-performant web animations feel awkward, “janky”, and, above all, slow . Developers often invest quite a bit of time to reduce first ... more

Making Search Talk: Connecting Algolia and Alexa

Mostly, I just wanted to stop typing so much. A couple of years back, I bought an Amazon Echo. It was on a whim, really. I had been buying all of my food on Amazon Fresh, Amazon announced a special Prime-only smart speaker, and I decided that Jeff Bezos ... more

Improving Web Performance to Mirror Engine Speed

Performance is a core feature of Algolia. Our search engine delivers millisecond results across millions of records. It was originally designed for mobile devices where the resources are very limited, but was after transformed into an online API that ... more