Algolia’s Awesome API
Thank the internet gods for the modern state of APIs. As a designer and frontend prototyper all to often my side-projects would languish due to lack of engineering skill.
I had been working on one such project, BrainAB, for months now. BrainAB is an online library for historical books. Per the aforementioned lack of engineering skill the project’s core feature, an autocomplete search engine, remained in a perpetual state of incompletion.
Through it all some of my programming friends had been able to build a rudimentary search engine for the site but couldn’t dedicate enough energy to fully flesh out the feature.
I searched for options that could help complete my quest and rediscovered Algolia in the process.
Side Note:
Before I taught myself HTML, CSS, and a bit of a JavaScript Algolia is something I had tried to integrate with BrainAB previously. At the time my front-end development knowledge began (and ended) at Weebly and Squarespace.
I got to work stealing away what hours I could to integrate BrainAB with Algolia’s API. Nothing would make me happier than spinning a yarn about my own (indefatigable) will as well as praise Algolia’s (superb) documentation. In the end it was comments from Algolia’s community that ended up saving the project providing the last bit of knowledge to get my search engine working.
With the keystone line of code in place I was able to fulfill the two requirements I had set for the search engine:
- When users begin typing the search engine auto generates results.
- When users click on a book result it redirects them to the correct page.
