Algolia announces instantSearch.js

announce
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From Algolia:

A library of UI widgets to help you build the best instant-search experience with Algolia’s Hosted Search API.

There’s a widget for that

Pick from an extensive library of widgets to power your search
and build a state-of-the-art instant-search experience

More than widgets

Your code is easy to write and maintain. instantsearch.js provides the glue between the different parts of your search page. Everything is packaged in one library.

Infinite possibilities

Every website is different. The modular design of instantsearch.js allows you to configure, rearrange and combine the widgets to build your own experience.

source: https://community.algolia.com/instantsearch.js/

What do you guys think?

With this new library, does it make Algolia a must-us for search? It seems like you’d be drastically reinventing the wheel otherwise.

1 Like
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Well, for some usecases it seems nice - if search can pay for itself.
As it seems that it is coupled with their service directly.
Or I just got it wrong :smiley:

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They have a free tier for 100,000 calls per month.

Then $49 a month (or about $600 per year).

Even at $600/year-- seems like it makes sense if it would take a programmer more than 3 days to program an exact equivalent of algolia.

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100,000 calls with under 10,000 documents.
I dont have users but paying $49/month during development over weekends it is too much for me.

db.streams.find({online: true}).count()
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For now I dont care about search too much, but as I will be running on Neo4j with querying dependant on relationships, I would love some prepared UI. But structure of my data will probably not match their requirement. Or my time which would be needed to export it to them in good format.

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NodeChef’s Meteor hosting platform comes with free hosted search engine. The search features can be included in your app in minutes.

http://nodechef.com/features