Algolia is a powerful search and discovery API for creating fast and relevant search experiences. Designed to optimize user interaction, Algolia enables teams to build and refine custom search functionalities. It offers features like instant search, autocomplete, faceted search, and typo tolerance, ensuring users find what they need quickly and accurately.
Why we like (and use) Algolia
There several compelling reasons why we use Algolia here at Kanopi:
Speed & performance. Algolia provides lightning-fast search capabilities, enhancing the user experience on our websites.
- Developer’s perspective: Offloading the search functionality to Algolia instead of relying on the main site database significantly speeds up overall site performance. By handling search queries separately, the primary database experiences reduced load and faster response times, leading to a smoother and more efficient user experience.
Relevance. The advanced search algorithms ensure highly relevant search results, improving user satisfaction and engagement.
Query suggestions. Algolia’s query suggestions feature provides users with real-time search suggestions as they type, enhancing the search experience by predicting and displaying relevant queries. Also, developers or editors can easily rank, add and/or remove query suggestions as needed, ensuring the search interface remains intuitive and relevant.
Customization. Algolia’s flexible API allows us to tailor search functionalities to meet specific client needs and preferences.
- Developer’s perspective: Being able to easily customize the frontend to meet design and client expectations is a wonderful thing! Algolia’s ease of customization stands out, thanks to its extensive documentation and examples for adding search functionalities to a site.
- Algolia covers all popular JavaScript frameworks, such as React, Vue, Angular, as well as iOS, Android, and vanilla JavaScript. This comprehensive support empowers frontend developers to effortlessly integrate and customize search interfaces to meet specific client requirements.
Scalability. As our clients grow, Algolia scales effortlessly, handling increasing volumes of data and traffic without compromising on performance.
Ease of integration. Algolia integrates seamlessly with various platforms and technologies, including Drupal, making it a perfect fit for our technical stack.
How we use Algolia
We use Algolia to enhance the search capabilities on our clients’ websites. Here’s a brief overview of our approach:
Search implementation. We integrate Algolia’s search API into the client’s CMS, customizing the search interface to match the website’s design and user needs.
- Developer’s perspective: The Search API Algolia module for Drupal allows us to easily set up content for Algolia to build a search index using a method familiar to anyone who’s ever worked with the Drupal Search API.
However, Developers aren’t limited to this one Drupal module for sending data to Algolia. There are actually many ways to push and pull data to Algolia’s service. Developers can also create custom modules to meet specific client search needs if the Search API module doesn’t meet their requirements. The flexibility with which Algolia ingests data enables developers to curate the data before passing it to Algolia, ensuring a tailored and optimized search experience.
Indexing content. We set up and configure indexing rules to ensure all relevant content is searchable. This includes real-time indexing for dynamic content updates.
- Developer’s perspective: When using the Drupal Algolia Search API module, any new, updated, or deleted content is immediately pushed to Algolia and can be searched almost instantly. This seamless integration makes indexing both new and existing content easy and efficient.
Search optimization. We fine-tune Algolia’s search settings to prioritize the most relevant results and ensure a seamless user experience.
Analytics and refinement. Using Algolia’s built-in analytics, we can continuously monitor search performance and user behavior, making data-driven adjustments to enhance search accuracy and effectiveness.
Using one of our clients — the Exploratorium — as an example, here are images showing examples of Exploratorium’s Algolia Analytics metrics:
Examples of Algolia in action with Exploratorium
Renowned San Francisco public learning laboratory the Exploratorium needed to revamp their search experience. We used Algolia to create an intuitive, responsive search interface that caters to diverse visitor needs. The improved search functionality has significantly boosted user engagement, search relevancy, and satisfaction. (See the full case study for Exploratorium here.)
Specifically, we used Algolia’s Autocomplete and InstantSearch.js UI libraries:
Example of Algolia Autocomplete library
We integrated the Autocomplete library into the header, providing users with real-time suggestions as they type into the input field. This autocomplete feature predicts and displays full terms or results, forming the core of the autocomplete experience.
Example of Algolia InstantSearch.js
InstantSearch.js provides faceted search results.
