16 Apr 2013
If you are a Ruby developer and have
an iPhone, chances are you already now about the cool project that is
RubyMotion! I quote:
“It lets you quickly develop and test native iOS applications for iPhone or
iPad, all using the awesome Ruby language you know and love.”
And it rocks! It’s actually used by the Ruby on Rails sponsor 37signals.
What if you could use your favorite search engine along with your favorite
language to create iOS apps? That’s exactly what we propose with Algolia’s
RubyMotion search gem that seamlessly integrates in your Ruby project. You
know the trick:
gem 'motion-algolia-search'
The gem code is open source. You can fork it from
github.
Special thanks to the RubyMotion team and especially to
Joffrey for this integration!
11 Apr 2013
The NEXT Berlin Conference will
take place on April 23rd & 24th in one of the most active entrepreneurial
ecosystems in Europe! More than 100 experts will share their knowledge with
an expected audience of 2000 attendees.
If you follow our newsletter or social presence, chances are you saw our call
for help to participate in the NEXT Berlin startup competition. We sincerely
thank you for your votes! They placed us in the 30 top startups to be
considered for the final. The judges then selected us as one of the 12
finalists to pitch during the conference. We are thrilled to be able
to present Algolia to Berlin!
If you happen to be attending NEXT Berlin, ping me if you’d like to meet!
(@dessaigne on twitter, or nicolas at algolia dot com).
26 Mar 2013
After launching the Beta Cloud version of Algolia, we wanted to demonstrate
what it can do. We built a search engine using CrunchBase data, so
entrepreneurs can easily search for their company or themselves. Check it
out!
You can search for companies, people and financial organizations, using
multiple attributes. Results are updated after each keystroke and matching
characters are highlighted. And of course it tolerates typos. In this post
we’ll explain in more detail how it works.
Indexation
The CrunchBase API is unfortunately rather poor. There is no way to know the
latest update. So we dump it regularly and push it to our servers in JSON
format after pruning unnecessary attributes and adding images encoded in
base64.
We actually create 3 indexes for companies (117k+ entries), persons (152k+
entries) and financial organizations (9k+ entries). The JSON files, including
images, are respectively 150MB, 70MB & 7MB. The full indexation takes about 5
seconds (excluding upload time). Resulting index sizes are respectfully 124MB,
85MB and 7,5MB.
Indexation is done simultaneously in 3 datacenters: US-West, US-East & Europe.
Additional datacenters are on the roadmap.
Instant Search
We trigger a query directly after page load and again after each keystroke. To
simplify communication with the server, we created a javascript client
(contact us if you want to use it before its release). We then simply call the
search function indicating the callback that will handle resulting hits
asynchronously. More details to follow once we’ve written the doc!
We automatically choose the server closest to your location by using Amazon
Route 53. Once the DNS lookup is resolved, it
lets us get low enough latencies that the response feels nearly instantaneous
(if you test it from North America or Europe). From DSL connections, we obtain
search latencies of about 90ms in San Francisco, 75ms in New York and 65ms in
London. About 20ms are used for querying the index, 5ms for compressing the
data and 5ms for uncompressing. The remaining time is the actual transfer of
the data and depends of your location and the quality of your connection.
If you’re a hacker, you may also remark the presence of an API key in the
javascript. It cannot be hidden as we directly query our servers from the
browser. The operations it enables are however restricted to search only, you
would need to use a different key to update entries for example. You can
create and revoke as many API keys you need directly from the API.
Hits Display
No designer worked on the demo, but we hope it doesn’t show! We execute the 3
queries simultaneously and display the results by blocks of 20 hits.
Additional queries are automatically triggered when scrolling to the bottom of
the page.
We display approximate results with a transparent background to clearly
differentiate them.
You can use the arrow keys to navigate inside the results.
Ranking
We use the standard ranking order. By descending priority:
- Exact matches before approximate matches;
- User-defined order of attributes;
- Distance between the matching term and the beginning of the attribute;
- Proximity between terms in multi-word queries;
- User defined score.
For the order of attributes, we use {name, twitter, organization or people,
description}. This translates into very simple settings. Here are the settings
of the persons index, for example:
{
"attributesToIndex": ["name", "twitter", "unordered(companies)", "description"],
"attributesToHighlight": ["name", "twitter", "companies", "description"],
"customRanking": ["desc(size)", "asc(name)"]
}
By default, all attributes are indexed and highlighted: “attributesToIndex” &
“attributesToHighlight” enable us to precisely define what to index (and in
what order) and what to highlight. The “unordered” modifier disable ranking
between values of a multi-valued attributes.
For the user defined score (“customRanking” in settings) , we sort by
decreasing order of CrunchBase entry size and then by alphabetical order.
Help us
This is just a demo but we’d like to continue improving it! Please tell us
what you think and send your suggestions: contact at algolia dot com
18 Mar 2013
Imagine all the power and simplicity of Algolia Search, but available online,
from any connected device. Welcome to our Cloud!
Up to now, our instant, typo-friendly search was only available locally on
your device. You could only index data stored directly in your app. While that
was great for offline apps, it was not so fantastic for rapidly changing data
server-side. All that has just changed! You can now use our search engine
online, enabling you to change your data at any frequency and return
consistantly up-to-date search results in your apps. Interested? Request your
invitation to the Beta from the features
page.
And don’t forget you can combine it with our offline SDK, for great search
performance whatever the connectivity!
12 Mar 2013
Yes, you read that right! We’re not talking about a free trial, but of a
completely FREE version of our SDK. It is often difficult to implement a good
search experience, so we want to democratize access to easy-to-integrate and
first class search features! All you have to do is to display non-intrusive
Algolia branding.
This branded offer is already available on our website. Don’t delay, register
today! Check out our use-cases
section to discover possible
implementations and see how Sharypic, Offline dictionaries, and Sush.io have
integrated Algolia in their apps.
Help us spread the word. We want every app developer to be able to take
advantage of this offer!
If you are a Ruby developer and have
an iPhone, chances are you already now about the cool project that is
RubyMotion! I quote: