Most of us just Google a site’s name to find the link. Sometimes we throw words or even half of our intended phrase, and it just magically works! Thanks, Google, for being so fast and accurate to make this lazy method work. But wouldn’t it be so great if we could do this inside websites too?!
Voten is a great source of content; we host many submissions, channels, and comments created by awesome users. Even though we implemented excellent features such as bookmarking, and subscriptions, to make it easy for our users to find what they’re looking for, it still seemed like we needed more. We needed a cutting-edge search experience. That’s when Algolia came to the rescue.
Algolia comes to the rescue
Algolia is a French “search as a service” startup which nails this use-case. We needed a fast and accurate search experience, right? Well, as for the speed: most of Algolia’s search queries are being done in under 1ms. That’s Google kind of fast!
As for accuracy: it’s again the magic kind. Just throw words or even portion of words, and it won’t disappoint you.
Human level of accuracy
Algolia’s latest feature called “Query Rules” enabled a convenient feature. Let’s say; a breaking news is happening right now in Argentina, a submission is posted to cover it, but it can’t be easily found via users’ most searched keyword. Sure Voten’s algorithms work great, but sometimes even the best algorithms in the world can’t work as expected and require manual actions to be made. The “Query Rules” feature allows us to promote a particular post. So we can go ahead and define a query rule to promote the related submission every time someone’s search contains the word “Argentina”.
Algolia helped our “help center”
We also used Algolia’s service for searching through items in our “help center”. The idea paid off pretty well, as much as we didn’t need to use other methods such as tagging to make our “help center” more searchable.
How we afforded a premium search service
So the service looks great, but was it affordable? Even though Algolia worths every penny, Voten is a self-funded startup. But since Voten is a 100% open-source project, and Algolia has such a great love for the open-source community, they’re supporting our search needs through their open-source offering.
