jessebubble / algolia

Algolia provides software and tools to help you implement efficient, flexible, and insightful search on your sites and applications

Algolia

Algolia is a search-as-a-service platform that offers a suite of tools and APIs to help developers implement powerful search capabilities in their web and mobile applications. It's designed to provide fast and relevant search experiences for users, enabling you to deliver efficient and user-friendly search functionality without the need to build complex search algorithms from scratch.

Algolia Records (Indexing)

An Algolia record is a collection of attributes, where each attribute has a name and a value in the form of a key-value pair. When creating records, only include information that is relevant for searching, showing results, sorting, and relevance. Extraneous information should be omitted.

Once you have structured your data into records, you can send it to Algolia to make it searchable (through the Dashboard or API)

Example record with four different kinds of attributes (string, integer, array, and boolean):

{
  "title": "Blackberry and blueberry pie",
  "description": "A delicious pie recipe that combines blueberries and blackberries.",
  "image": "https://yourdomain.com/blackberry-blueberry-pie.jpg",
  "likes": 1128,
  "sales": 284,
  "categories": ["pie", "dessert", "sweet"],
  "gluten_free": false
}

Here's an example using Algolia and the React-InstantSearch API to search for records:

npm install algoliasearch react-instantsearch

import algoliasearch from 'algoliasearch/lite';
import { InstantSearch, SearchBox, Hits, Highlight } from 'react-instantsearch';

const applicationID = import.meta.env.VITE_ALGOLIA_APPLICATION_ID;
const searchOnlyApiKey = import.meta.env.VITE_ALGOLIA_SEARCH_ONLY_API_KEY;

const searchClient = algoliasearch(
    applicationID,
    searchOnlyApiKey
);

function Hit({ hit }) {
    return (
        <article >
            <img src={hit.image} alt={hit.name} />
            <p> {hit.categories[0]} </p>
            <h1> 
                <Highlight attribute="name" hit={hit} />
            </h1>
            <p> ${hit.price} </p>
        </article>
    );
}
export function App() {
    return (
        <div>
            <h1>Search Posts</h1>
            <InstantSearch searchClient={algoliaClient} indexName="your_index_name">
                <SearchBox />
                <Hits hitComponent={Hit} />
            </InstantSearch>
        </div>
    );
}

Alternatives for implementing search functionality:

1. MiniSearch: MiniSearch is a tiny but powerful in-memory fulltext search engine written in JavaScript. It is respectful of resources, and it can comfortably run both in Node and in the browser.

2. Elasticsearch: A widely-used open-source search engine that offers powerful text search capabilities, full-text search, and real-time indexing. It's highly scalable and can be used in various applications.

3. Searchkit: A toolkit for building powerful search experiences with Elasticsearch. It provides UI components for building search interfaces and visualizations.

4. Typesense: An open-source search engine that focuses on ease of use and fast indexing. It's designed to provide a developer-friendly experience and supports features like faceting and typo-tolerance.

5. MeiliSearch: An open-source, fast, and customizable search engine with features like typo-tolerance, filters, and instant search. It's designed for easy integration and offers simple RESTful API.

6. Fuse.js: While not a hosted API, Fuse.js is a lightweight JavaScript library that provides fuzzy search functionality for small to medium-sized datasets.

7. Amazon CloudSearch: A fully managed search service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It's designed to be simple to set up and provides scalable and highly available search capabilities.

8. Swiftype: Acquired by Elastic, Swiftype offers a powerful search-as-a-service solution. It's designed to be easy to set up and provides features like autocomplete, result ranking, and analytics.