Posts

You’ll find this post in your _posts directory. Go ahead and edit it and re-build the site to see your changes. You can rebuild the site in many different ways, but the most common way is to run jekyll serve, which launches a web server and auto-regenerates your site when a file is updated.

You probably already know it: any millisecond that end-users have to wait to get their results drives us nuts. But what on Earth does this have to do with Texas? Actually a lot!

It looked just like another page in the middle of the night. One of the servers of our search API stopped processing the indexing jobs for an unknown reason. Since we build systems in Algolia for high availability and resiliency, nothing bad was happening. The new API calls were correctly redirected to the rest of the healthy machines in the cluster and the only impact on the service was one woken-up engineer. It was time to find out what was going on.

You may have heard last week in the press, Algolia has just raised an $18.3M Series A round of financing led by Accel Partners! Philippe Botteri from Accel is joining our board and we can’t wait to benefit from his experience! We are also excited to welcome Lead Edge Capital and to have received the trust of industry pioneers such as Ilya Sukhar of Parse, Solomon Hykes of Docker, Erik Swan of Splunk, and Kevin Rose of Digg.

At Algolia, we are obsessed with finding a way to have a 99.9999% available architecture. On our way to achieve that, we have to make sure every piece of the architecture can safely fail without affecting the service.

Algolia’s DNA is really about performance. We want our search engine to answer relevant results as fast as possible.

Browsing the cumbersome interfaces of government websites in the lookout for reliable data can be a very frustrating experience. It’s full of specific terminology and there’s not a government website that looks the same. It’s like each time you want to use a car, you have to learn to drive all over again.

At Algolia, we allow developers to provide a unique interactive search experience with as-you-type search, instant faceting, mobile geo-search and on the fly spell check.

Exactly a year ago, we began to power the Hacker News search engine (see our blog post. Since then, our HN search project has grown a lot, expanding from 20M to 25M indexed items, and serving** from 900K to 30M searches a month**.

By working every day on building the best search engine, we’ve become obsessed with our own search experience on the websites and mobile applications we use.

In an economic environment where the competition for end-users’ attention and interest is fierce, overlooking search inside your website and mobile application may damage your business.

The following post is a guest post by Eoin O’Driscoll (web developer), and Vinny Glennon (co-founder) of FanFootage.com

Today we had a severe DNS issue that impacted some of our users during a total of 5 hours. Although most of our customers were not impacted, for some of them search simply went down. This event and its details deserved to be fully disclosed.

Algolia Increases Online Search Sessions By 60% and Unique Mobile Searches

by 270%

Algolia Speeds Up Search Result Delivery Times From 10 Seconds To 250 Milliseconds.The following post is a guest post by Teddy Chan, Founder and CEO at AfterShip.

Do you know the 3 most important things in search? Speed, speed, and speed!

There are a lot of music discovery apps on the market, yet sifting through concert listings is anything but seamless. That’s why Cyprus-based startup Concertwith.me aims to make finding local concerts and festivals as intuitive as possible. Automatically showing upcoming events in your area, the site offers personalized recommendations based on your preferences and your Facebook friends’ favorited music. Covering over 220,000 events globally, the site uses Algolia to offer meaningful results for visitors who are also looking for something different.

When one thinks of expense reporting, speed is far from the first descriptor that comes to mind. Companies spend a substantial amount of time tracking expenses, while employees linger in paperwork purgatory, wondering when they will be reimbursed for their work-related charges. That’s why Abacus has made it their mission to simplify expense management so that it occurs in real time. Their creative implementation of Algolia helps make it happen.

The following post is an interview of Vincent Paulin, R&D Manager at A Little Market (recently acquired by Etsy).

When we developed the first version of Algolia Search, we put a lot of effort into developing a data update API. It worked like this: You could send us a modified version of your data as soon as the change appeared, even if it concerned only a specific part of a record. For example, this batch of information could be the updated price or number of reviews, and we would only update this specific attribute in your index.

Since the first SaaS IPO by salesforce.com, the SaaS (Software as a Service) model has boomed in the last decade to become a global market that is worth billions today. It has taken a long way and a lot of evangelisation to get there.

We recently added the support for Synonyms in Algolia! It has been the most requested feature in Algolia since our launch in September. While it may seem simple, it actually took us some time to implement because we wanted to do it in a different way than classic search engines.

At Algolia, we are convinced that search queries need to be sent directly from the browser (or mobile app) to the search-engine in order to have a realtime search experience. This is why we have developed a search backend that replies within a few milliseconds through an API that handles security when called from the browser.

We interviewed Dylan La Com, Growth Product Manager at Qualaroo & GrowthHackers.com, about their Algolia implementation experience.

Yesterday, the OpenSSL project released an update to fix a serious security issue. This vulnerability was disclosed in CVE-2014-0160 and is more widely known as the Heartbleed vulnerability. It allows an attacker to grab the content in memory on a server. Given the widespread use of OpenSSL and the versions affected, this vulnerability affects a large percentage of services on the internet.

This week we have released a much requested feature by our customers: analytics.

As you may probably know, we’re using HipChat to build our live-help chat. If you want to know more, go ahead and read our guest post on HipChat’s blog.

Edit: As suggested on Hacker News, SHA256 is not secure, as it allows a length extension attack. We have replaced it with HMAC-SHA256.

During a few hours on March 17th you may have noticed longer response times for some of the queries sent by your users.

We launched the first beta of our Heroku add-on in October 2013 and are now happy to announce its general availability!

Most of our users are technical. They love writing code, and we love providing API clients in the major programming languages to them (we are currently supporting 10 platforms).

Today (Jan 29) at 9:30pm UTC, our service experienced an 8 minute partial outage during which we have rejected many write operations sent to the indexing API (exactly 2841 calls). We call it “partial” as all search queries have been honored without any problem. For end-users, there was no visible problem.

We are Hacker News readers and probably just like you, there is not a day that goes by we don’t use it. It is a little like checking the weather app of the tech world. Long story short, Hacker News is awesome, and we wanted to add our two cents to make it even greater to use.

Hello Twitter,

We recently reached a new milestone towards the release of our Search as a Service offer. We’re now proud to offer 10 API clients, covering all major languages.

Like most search engines, version 2.1 did not include any specific processing for Asian Languages. Version 2.2 significantly improves Asian language support (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) by including specific processing like the automatic conversion between Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese using the Unicode UniHan Database. This advanced processing was only possible because we built our own Unicode library. Many thanks to Stephen for his help!

One week after releasing our Java & Android clients, we are happy to release our iOS and OS X API clients for our search-as-a-service offer.

Our Search-as-a-Service offer is progressing toward its official release. We launched our Java and Android search API Clients at DroidCon Paris today! Come to see us if you’re attending!

We launched the private beta of our Search-as-a-Service offer two months ago. In that time we received very positive feedback from our beta testers and we couldn’t thank them enough for the help they provided. To date, they have sent over 1M indexation jobs and over 5M queries, and the trend is increasing.

We are pleased to introduce a new version of Algolia Search Offline for iOS, Android and OS X (Windows versions will come soon).

If you have an iOS device you probably search the App Store regularly for apps you have heard about. Following the recent AppGratis ousting from the AppStore, there were claims that the App Store search function is broken. That was our trigger to try something ourselves that could serve both as a good demo and help us to explore new use-cases! Check it out!

We have great news for our iOS and OS X users: our Offline SDK is now available as a CocoaPods _dependency._

While our latest news focused on the Algolia Search cloud offer (you can still join the beta, we’re pleased to introduce a major new version of Algolia Search offline: V2! It is available today for iOS, Android and OS X. Windows Phone and Windows versions will be released as soon as they are ready. A few months in the making, these new features were built on early customer feedback and will simplify integration.

If you are a Ruby developer and have an iPhone, chances are you already now about the cool project that is RubyMotion! I quote:

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.

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!

Imagine all the power and simplicity of Algolia Search, but available online, from any connected device. Welcome to our Cloud!

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.

I had the pleasure to be invited by David Catuhe to participate in a round table about Windows8 development during Microsoft TechDays 2013!

We’ll be in Barcelona next week for the Mobile World Congress! Last year, more than 67,000 attendees participated in the event.

Start In Paris is a monthly event where 5 startups have the opportunity to pitch their service to the Paris startup community. After a first selection and then a public vote, we were selected as one of 5 finalists of the #22 edition that took place yesterday, January the 28th!

Demonstrating how Algolia Search functions in the wild, in this post we will discuss a recent integration with sharypic, another Paris-based startup focussed on photo sharing at events.

When I started to develop for Android it appeared to me that an APK file was just an archive, a simple approach that you can find in many systems today. Files are extracted from the archive at installation and you can access them via the file-system.

About one month ago, we were given the opportunity to participate in Seedcamp Paris 2012. In this post I’ll try to think back to that time and provide feedback, along with some advice if you’re considering going in that direction. In short, I can already say that this experience has revolutionized the way we drive the company!

When we started Algolia Development for Android, binary size optimization was not one of our main concerns. In fact we even started to develop in JAVA before switching to C/C++ for reasons of performance.

I’ve been convinced for a long time that simplicity is the most important property of a product. Long-gone are the 90s when a product was admired for its complexity. But I am also convinced that this is the most complex property to achieve and maintain as time passes by.

One of the worst user experiences I have ever had with software was with the Sony PS3. I kind of liked this product; I found the user interface very nice and well organized… but they were much too aggressive about upgrades! They simply blocked features until the upgrade was done!

You may have been expecting Windows Phone 8 as our next platform of choice, but we preferred to go Windows 8 first! With more than 40M sold in a month, let’s say it’s a slightly more interesting market for now.

After going back and forth a few times with Apple, we are really happy to announce the availibility of our Smart Contacts application on the App Store! Even if we built it to demonstrate the amazing features of our search technology SDK, it can be used as an in-place replacement of the traditional iPhone Contacts app. Check it up!

Hey, we are thrilled to announce our nomination among the Seedcamp Paris finalists! The event will take place next week on Monday, just before LeWeb 2012 (by the way we’ll be there, feel free to ping us if you’d like to meet).

Autocomplete is so intuitive,that it seems like it would be easy to implement. However, most mobile apps that offer it provide a pretty poor user experience. Let’s look at the Twitter mobile app as an example.

Test!!!!…

I recently had a pretty bad user experience when I upgraded my personal Apple developer account into a professional one.

Last week provided me with an occasion to feel the tempo of the mobile ecosystem at Apps World in London. Here are a few thoughts about what I saw.

With the summer behind us, the period is pretty active. It’s really difficult to attend all the great events, big and small, organized out there. After Mobile Monday, Failcon and the first meeting of Appsterdam Paris this week, here are the major mobile app conferences we’re attending in the next few weeks!

We are pleased to announce Algolia Search Beta 3, our third release with a strong focus on performance.

We are pleased to announce the launch of Algolia Search Beta 2, our second release!

Time flies! I just realized we didn’t offer any feedback about our participation in the Evernote DevCup back in July.

After a few months in the making, our first mobile library is finally ready to hit the shelves! Well, nearly! Before releasing it, we want all the feedback you can give us to ensure it’s bug-free, easy to use and responsive to your needs.

Let’s rewind time a bit. Back in June was the famous Apple Developer Conference, aka WWDC 2012. Algolia didn’t even have a website at that time, but what we did have is a friend who would attend: Thomas! That was an occasion we could not pass!

When it comes to programming languages and performance, you can read all and its opposite on the web. It’s definitely a very controversial topic!

I started developing for iOS in 2009 by learning about the Objective-C language. At that time ARC (Automatic Reference Counting) was not yet available and developers were responsible for alloc/release/autorelease. I found it pretty straightforward as it was very similar to C++ and the resulting code was very self-explanatory.

You mint already be familiar with Evernote. It’s a great company that delivers an impressive product that I use often, both professionally and personally. When we heard about them organizing their second developer competition, we immediately thought about the fantastic opportunity it could be for Algolia!

At one time or another, most developers come across bugs or problems with Unicode (about 3,720,000 results on google for the request unicode bug developer at the time of this writing). Let me tell you about my experience in the last decade and why we have now implemented our own unicode Library to produce exactly the same result across devices/languages.

On June 19 & 20th, I had the chance to participate to LeWeb 2012 London edition. This year theme was “Faster than Real Time” and we had an impressive list of speakers! But the true value of LeWeb is elsewhere: It’s in the 1283 people from 52 countries who were present and with whom you could network!