Algolia

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Algolia, Inc.
Company typePrivate
Industry
GenreSearch and index
Founded10 October 2012 Edit this on Wikidata
Founders
  • Nicolas Dessaigne
  • Julien Lemoine
Headquarters,
U.S.
Area served
Worldwide
Key people
  • Bernadette Nixon (CEO)
  • Sean Mullaney (CTO)
Services
Number of employees
800+
Websitealgolia.com

Algolia is an American proprietary search-as-a-service platform. Its main product is a web search platform for individual websites.

Company[edit]

Algolia was founded in 2012 by Nicolas Dessaigne and Julien Lemoine, both originally from Paris, France.[1][2] It was originally a company focused on offline search on mobile phones. Later it was selected to be part of Y Combinator's Winter 2014 class.[3][2]

Starting with two data centres in Europe and the US, Algolia opened a third center in Singapore in March 2014,[4] and as of 2019, claimed to be present in over 70 data centers across 16 worldwide regions.[5] It serves roughly 11,000+ customers, handling 60 billion user queries per month.[6] In May 2015, Algolia received $18.3M in a series A investment from a financial group led by Accel Partners,[7] and in 2017 a $53M series B investment, also led by Accel Partners.[8] 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.[9]

In January 2021, Algolia acquired Romanian AI and machine learning startup Morph.[10]

In July 2021, Algolia raised a $150 million Series D funding round and became a unicorn, with a valuation of $2.25 billion.[11]

Products and technology[edit]

The Algolia model provides search as a service, offering web search across a client's website using an externally hosted search engine.[12][13] 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 JSON API,[14] then the search box is added to the client's web pages.[15]

API[edit]

Algolia provides their search service via various APIs.[16] The Rest API provides basic features of search, analysis and monitoring. There are 10 supported languages and platforms for client usage.

Infrastructure[edit]

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.[17]

The DSN feature allows setting the locations in Algolia's network where the data should be duplicated.[18]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Roland, Sylvain (16 October 2019). "Pourquoi la France a raté Algolia, le "Google français des professionnels" au succès fulgurant" [Why France missed Algolia, the dazzlingly successful "French Google for professionals"]. La Tribune (in French).
  2. ^ a b Magistretti, Bérénice (8 June 2017). "Powering Twitch and Medium, search startup Algolia raises $53 million". VentureBeat.
  3. ^ Romain Dillet (21 January 2014). "Algolia Provides 'Spotlight' For The Web With Its Turbocharged Real-Time Search API". techcrunch.com.
  4. ^ Romain Dillet (21 March 2014). "Algolia Adds Asian Data Center While Taking Over Search On The Web". techcrunch.com.
  5. ^ "Algolia's website". algolia.com. 11 September 2016.
  6. ^ Caroline Kunz (July 22, 2016). "How Algolia Uses Wavefront to Keep Its Hosted Search API Instantaneous for 12B+ Queries Monthly". wavefront.com.
  7. ^ "Algolia Raises $18.3M Series A Investment Led by Accel Partners". builtwith.com. 11 September 2016.
  8. ^ "Algolia raises $53 million for its search engine API". TechCrunch. 8 June 2017. Retrieved 2021-10-24.
  9. ^ "Algolia Usage Statistics". builtwith.com. 11 September 2016.
  10. ^ Sawers, Paul (26 January 2021). "Algolia acquires MorphL to turbocharge 'search-as-a-service' platform with AI". VentureBeat. Archived from the original on 27 January 2021. Retrieved 28 January 2021.
  11. ^ "Search API startup Algolia raises $150 million at $2.25 billion valuation". 28 July 2021.
  12. ^ Leanstack (March 23, 2014). "How Algolia Built Their Realtime Search as a Service Product". thenewstack.io.
  13. ^ Josiah Motley (July 29, 2016). "Interview with the CEO of search powerhouse, Algolia". vator.tv.
  14. ^ "REST API". algolia.com.
  15. ^ "How it works". algolia.com.
  16. ^ "Github". builtwith.com. 11 September 2016.
  17. ^ Julien Lemoine (13 August 2015). "Algolia's Fury Road To A Worldwide API". medium.com.
  18. ^ Author, Guest (2015-05-21). "Under The Hood of Algolia API". Leaseweb Blog. Retrieved 2023-04-29. {{cite web}}: |last= has generic name (help)

External links[edit]