<story><title>Thoughts on Algolia vs. Solr and Elasticsearch</title><url>http://opensourceconnections.com/blog/2016/06/01/thoughts-on-algolia/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>latenightcoding</author><text>I remember a previous employer asked me to talk to one of the authors because I have NLP and search engine design experience (I forgot which author). I remember he kept saying they don&amp;#x27;t do big data and that most NLP stuff other search engines use are irrelevant because their product works with the type of search they do. I asked a couple of complex questions which they disregarded as not important for their product.&lt;p&gt;This was probably 3 years ago or less so the product might have changed, but what I got out of that chat was that Algolia is for websites that want to add a search functionality with a nice UI without much hassle.&lt;p&gt;But if you are doing something complex it&amp;#x27;s does not compare to Solr or Elasticsearch&lt;p&gt;Again this was a while ago.</text></comment>
<story><title>Thoughts on Algolia vs. Solr and Elasticsearch</title><url>http://opensourceconnections.com/blog/2016/06/01/thoughts-on-algolia/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>softwaredoug</author><text>(Author here) Case in point where Elasticsearch shines is one of yesterday&amp;#x27;s hacker news articles&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;sujitpal.blogspot.com&amp;#x2F;2016&amp;#x2F;05&amp;#x2F;elasticsearch-based-image-search-using.html?m=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;sujitpal.blogspot.com&amp;#x2F;2016&amp;#x2F;05&amp;#x2F;elasticsearch-based-ima...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Here Elasticsearch is used as a framework where &amp;quot;search&amp;quot; really means some kind of distributed feature similarity. But even text search where your incorporating a lot of data science, external signals, or semantic awareness can fall more into the category of distributed feature similarity.&lt;p&gt;Algolias strength is in a simpler path to straightforward and easily understood search. I&amp;#x27;m not sure it&amp;#x27;s the path to amazing and deeply customized search (or search-driven features). Algolia gets far more right out of the box at a configuration level many need when they can&amp;#x27;t put a team around building an amazing Solr&amp;#x2F;ES experience.&lt;p&gt;My hope is Solr&amp;#x2F;ES can learn a thing or two in the ease of use dept with relevance!</text></comment>