Algolia Search Puts Focus On Speed, Personalization, Voice

Algolia on Thursday released updates to its search technology with personalization, voice and mobile capabilities. The latest release also speeds the process for desktop, mobile and voice user interfaces.

With more than 7,500 customers conducting more than 60 billion searches monthly on Algolia, the latest release allows customers to deliver search experiences to consumers in more than 70 languages.

Speed has become one of the major criteria for a website. Fast, responsive user experiences are critical to customer satisfaction.

Dustin Coates, voice search lead at Algolia, said the company powers search and discovery in the background for brands like NPR, Amazon-owned Twitch, and National Geographic. “Whether the site is slower or faster is immaterial, because the communication happens between the user and Algolia,” said Coates, not the brand or the company.

The company aims for a response time between 10 and 20 milliseconds, so when a user types or speaks, the search turns into a conversation without latency.

Algolia, which hosts the data for the company, has accelerated searches that use faceting and filtering by up to 30%. It also reduced the time to index data by up to 10% for complex search use cases, allowing marketplaces and media companies to shorten the time between new content publication and that content appearing in search results.

The latest personalization simulator tool provides non-technical users with greater control in weighting the personalization attributes and then visualizes how the configuration changes the search results and impacts the end user experience in real time.

Personalization allows business users to collect key information, such as click data, add-to-cart and purchase data, and then build rules so they can use this customer preference data to tailor search results across mobile, desktop and voice user experiences.

Algolia began as a mobile search company to improve search. The company soon moved to a hosted solution to improve search developer experiences.

For the new voice search feature, developers built a JavaScript Speech-to-Text integration that allows developers to embed voice input within their mobile websites in minutes.

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