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Algolia Stories
stories.algolia.com · Company blog · on HN since 2016
Engineering and company blog from Algolia, the search API provider, on infrastructure, latency, culture and developer tooling.
What HN saysHN commenters call its posts good, especially those on search latency, bare metal infrastructure, scaling and building a culture around ownership.
15HN people shared it
4linked it in comments
17stories submitted
52story points
1 year agolast shared
2016people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Building a Search Engine in CSS2 people · 3 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 2The new paradigm: engineers as marketers2 people · 2 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 3Algolia s fury road to a worldwide api c1536c46f3a52 people · first shared 2017
- 4Culture as a Growth Driver1 people · 17 points · first shared 2018 · 9 comments on HN
- 5A Search Engine in CSS1 people · 5 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 6Curing blank page syndrome: turn every engineer into a writer1 people · 4 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 7A Search Engine in CSS (2018)1 people · 4 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 8How Algolia uses Electron to improve internal productivity1 people · 4 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 9Using RethinkDB change feeds to make indexing Algolia a breeze1 people · 3 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 10From Paris to Silicon Valley: Speaking at React Conf 20171 people · 2 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 11A Different Kind of Swag1 people · 2 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 12API Documentation should read like a travel guide to your home town1 people · 2 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 13[Search] Algolia: Born to Be Mobile1 people · 1 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 14Indexing PDF for Searching Using Tika, Nokogiri, and Algolia1 people · 1 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 15Who’s Jeff?–Things we learned at #Serverlessconf London 20161 people · 1 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
faizshah · 2017-04-02
Would be interesting to see the story of how you guys started from square one and built out your bare metal infrastructure.
Really love the docsearch project btw, great UX.
EDIT: Just found this blog post right after posting this comment https://stories.algolia.com/algolia-s-fury-road-to-a-worldwide-api-c15…
manigandham · 2017-11-09
.com/net/org are also faster, especially internationally, because of more infrastructure. Algolia found the same during their testing [1].
Use the main TLDs for serving traffic and .io/* for corporate/marketing sites or webapps if the occasional outage isn't a major problem.
1. https://stories.algolia.com/algolia-s-fury-road-to-a-worldwide-api-c15…
jakozaur · 2017-06-08
Congratulations!
Algolia wrote some good blog posts, for example:
https://stories.algolia.com/how-the-founders-of-algolia-think-about-sc…
https://stories.algolia.com/how-algolia-built-a-culture-first-company-…
gibrown · 2017-06-08
Algolia has done some terrific work on search latency (and written about it which is awesome https://stories.algolia.com/how-algolia-reduces-latency-for-21b-search…
I think ES can get there, but depends a lot on what hardware you deploy (SSDs!), how you build your index, and whether you can geographically distribute your search engine close to your users.
We have one ES cluster with hundreds of queries per second that gives median 9ms response times and 99th percentile around 160ms. Another cluster with 100x more data that gets 20-25ms median response times and 99th percentile at 360ms.
Now both of these are just the ES response time, there is additional overhead in responding to an API request and then you also start to get into where your data centers are located relative to the end users.
More (slightly out of date) background on our config: https://data.blog/2016/05/03/state-of-wordpress-com-elasticsearch-syst…