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What Does Algolia do?

Algolia provides a set of tools that helps engineers build search functionality into their apps.

web-apps

Last updated: July 4, 2025

The TL;DR

Algolia provides a set of tools that helps engineers build search functionality into their apps. Think: literal search bars.

  • Many of the most commonly visited websites (think Amazon, Netflix, Youtube, Lululemon) are dependent on a frictionless search experience
  • Search is based on crawling and indexing your data, kind of like the index in the back of a book
  • Building search and discovery from scratch is complicated and requires a good degree of specialized expertise
  • Algolia provides ‘search as a service’ through a suite of developer tools, plus a dashboard to configure settings and track usage

Algolia claims almost 2T searches a year and 17,000 customers, so it’s definitely a company worth diving into.

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Why developers and product teams use Algolia

Algolia's bread and butter product is website search, which they break into three steps: configure, observe, and enhance. Let's take a look at each.

Upload/Configure: The first step is uploading your data and configuring the search functionality. In order for Algolia to run their search, you first must give them the data you want users to run search on. Most engineers opt to send their data to Algolia via API, but data can also be added manually or via CSV/JSON files.

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Observe: Search is only as helpful as the value it provides for end users. Algolia makes it easy to track the ways users interact with your search via usage analytics.

Enhance: Enhance provides tools to improve the search experience based on usage and user patterns. While the initial search configuration is unlikely to be the most optimized, Algolia has added AI functionality to auto-improve the experience, including automatic creation of common synonyms, dynamic re-rankings of items, and user personalization strategies.

How does search actually work?

To understand how you outsource search for your app, we must first understand what search is in the first place. Let’s take the example of Google Search, a small search engine you may have heard of.

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