Algolia is a French proprietary
search-as-a-service platform, with its headquarters in San Francisco and offices in Paris and London. Its main product is a web search platform for individual websites.
Company
Algolia was founded in 2012 by Nicolas Dessaigne and Julien Lemoine, both originally from Paris, France.
It was originally a company focused on offline search on mobile phones. Later it was selected to be part of
Y Combinator
Y Combinator, LLC (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator and venture capital firm launched in March 2005 which has been used to launch more than 5,000 companies. The accelerator program started in Boston and Mountain View, Californi ...
's Winter 2014 class.
Starting with two
data centre
A data center is a building, a dedicated space within a building, or a group of buildings used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems.
Since IT operations are crucial for business ...
s in Europe and the US, Algolia opened a third center in Singapore in March 2014,
and as of 2019, claimed to be present in over 70 data centers across 16 worldwide regions.
It serves roughly 18,000+ customers, handling over 1.75+ Trillion searches a year.
In May 2015, Algolia received $18.3M in a
series A investment from a financial group led by
Accel Partners
Accel, formerly known as Accel Partners, is a global venture capital firm. Accel works with startups in seed, early and growth-stage investments. The company has offices in Palo Alto, California and San Francisco, California, with additional ope ...
,
and in 2017 a $53M series B investment, also led by Accel Partners. From June 2016 to September 2019, the usage of Algolia by small websites increased from 632 to 5,168 in the "top 1 million websites" and 197 in the "top 10k websites" evaluated by Built With.
In January 2021, Algolia acquired Romanian AI and machine learning startup Morph.
In July 2021, Algolia raised a $150 million Series D funding round and became a
unicorn
The unicorn is a legendary creature that has been described since Classical antiquity, antiquity as a beast with a single large, pointed, spiraling horn (anatomy), horn projecting from its forehead.
In European literature and art, the unico ...
, with a valuation of $2.25 billion.
Products and technology
The Algolia model provides
search as a service
Searching may refer to:
Music
* " Searchin", a 1957 song originally performed by The Coasters
* "Searching" (China Black song), a 1991 song by China Black
* "Searchin" (CeCe Peniston song), a 1993 song by CeCe Peniston
* " Searchin' (I Gott ...
, offering web search across a client's website using an externally hosted
search engine
A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...
.
Although in-site search has long been available from general web search providers such as Google, this is typically done as a subset of general web searching. Algolia's product only indexes their clients' sites. Data for the client site is
pushed from the client to Algolia via a
RESTful
REST (Representational State Transfer) is a software architectural style that was created to describe the design and guide the development of the architecture for the World Wide Web. REST defines a set of constraints for how the architecture of ...
JSON
JSON (JavaScript Object Notation, pronounced or ) is an open standard file format and electronic data interchange, data interchange format that uses Human-readable medium and data, human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consi ...
API, then the search box is added to the client's web pages.
API
Algolia provides their search service via various APIs.
The Rest API provides basic features of search, analysis and monitoring. There are 10 supported languages and platforms for client usage.
Infrastructure
Algolia documented one attempt to remove all single points of failure in their architecture and proposed a worldwide infrastructure called ''Distributed Search Network'' to reply to a search query from any location closer to the source.
The DSN feature allows setting the locations in Algolia's network where the data should be duplicated.
See also
*
Apache Lucene
Apache Lucene is a free and open-source search engine software library, originally written in Java by Doug Cutting. It is supported by the Apache Software Foundation and is released under the Apache Software License. Lucene is widely used as a ...
*
Apache Solr
Solr (pronounced "solar") is an open-source enterprise-search platform, written in Java. Its major features include full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, real-time indexing, dynamic clustering, database integration, NoSQL features ...
*
Coveo
*
Elasticsearch
Elasticsearch is a Search engine (computing), search engine based on Apache Lucene, a free and open-source search engine. It provides a distributed, Multitenancy, multitenant-capable full-text search engine with an HTTP web interface and schema ...
*
Lucidworks
References
External links
*{{Official website, https://www.algolia.com/
Internet search engines
Semantic Web
Y Combinator companies
Online companies of the United States
Search engine software