French startup Algolia provides a real-time search API that makes the search function on your website sexy. Now Y Combinator-backed, it’s faster than anything you’ve seen before — everything happens in real time, and results change with each keystroke.
“We first started with an offline search engine that would work well on mobile,” co-founder and CEO Nicolas Dessaigne told me in a phone interview. “It worked but wasn’t a success. Many people wanted us to run the search queries on our servers, so that’s what we did.”
Algolia is a developer-friendly hosted search engine for database objects. It will suit your needs perfectly if you run a sport results website, an e-commerce store, a movie database, a CRM, or any website that relies on small chunks of text (not big pages of text like Wikipedia or TechCrunch). Until now, there wasn’t any framework or API that was optimized for this kind of a database — Swiftype, Searchify and others all rely on big data-oriented Elasticsearch.
The installation process is very reminiscent of integrating Stripe for credit card payments — adding Algolia’s search engine is just a matter of adding a few lines of code. You can see all that in the live demo.
