Oct. 17, 2023, 12:12 p.m.
What Does Algolia do?
Algolia is a tool that engineers use to build search experiences into their apps.
Technically
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