Built for The Now Economy — Algolia Summer ‘19

Jul 17th 2019 algolia

Consumers today want instant, frictionless Google- and Amazon-like experiences when looking for information, media content and products. They demand intuitive experiences that deliver exactly what they are looking for — regardless of the digital interface — and they want it Now. Today, this is what determines whether a customer engages, subscribes, and/or buys from a business.

At Algolia, we call this the “Now Economy.”

With over 3.8 billion global internet users constantly searching for anything and everything online, in the Now Economy, businesses must meet this challenge and take advantage of each moment of digital interaction — the “Now Moments”. In these Now Moments, businesses must provide engaging, personalized experiences that connect a consumer’s intent with the best, most relevant content, regardless of the digital interface.

The need to deliver on Now Moments anywhere and all the time is what drives Algolia’s product and engineering team to continually innovate on our customers’ behalf. Today, I’m excited to share with you that it’s what has driven us to deliver Algolia Summer’ 19.

Algolia Summer ‘19 is all about delivering fast, tailored and personalized experiences across any channel. With this latest release, developers and businesses of any size can deliver search and discovery “Now Moments” across web, mobile and voice channels through the following innovations and enhancements.

Personalizing Experiences for Now Moments

With Algolia Summer ‘19, business users can quickly create personalization rules based on ingested customer preference data such as click data and purchase data to tailor search results for customers. Through Algolia’s new personalization simulator tool, users are able to tune the weighting of personalization attributes and then visualize the end user experience in real time to ensure the intended results are delivered.

In addition, developers can build a unified personalization experience across search, browse, and email marketing through integration with personalization solutions including Dynamic Yield’s AI-powered Personalization Anywhere™ platform, Target2Sell’s AI Platform for 1to1 Commerce, and Raptor’s Smart Advisor. Developers can also leverage Algolia’s new User Profile API to utilize Algolia-generated user profiles in third party solutions.

Pioneering Intelligent Voice Search

With consumers increasingly adopting voice-activated devices like Alexa and Google Home, along with using their voice to quickly seek information on their mobile device, Algolia Summer ‘19 has further enhanced its voice search capabilities to help businesses meet this growing trend and respond to user requests with the most relevant results.

With Algolia Summer ‘19, through improved entity matching, developers can easily build voice search experiences that account for differences in the ways people speak and vocalize what they are looking for to deliver more accurate search results. In addition, new pre-built JavaScript Speech-to-Text integrations allow developers to embed voice search into the browser in minutes. This works on the desktop, iOS and Android.

Powering “On-the-Go” Search

With the proliferation of mobile devices for “on-the-go, always on” consumers, delivering on Now Moments through simple, intuitive mobile search is critical. With new pre-built mobile UI libraries, Algolia Summer ‘19 provides developers increased flexibility to control the mobile user experience, implement mobile-optimized menus and filtering, and integrate the branding of their search user interface for mobile websites and apps.

Developers also now can leverage Algolia’s search API in 14 different development environments, as well as a new API client for Kotlin, the new language of choice for Android that provides another option for developing mobile experiences.

Performing Even Better

Finally, to deliver on Now Moments, personalized results and experiences must be returned with lightning fast speed. With Algolia Summer ‘19, Algolia continues to push the boundaries by improving its discovery experience by up to 30% using filtered searches. Algolia has also reduced indexing time by up to 10% allowing companies to shorten the time between new content going live and its appearance in search results.

Many Thanks and More To Come

Algolia was purpose-built as a modern “search-as-a-service platform” to give companies of all sizes the best of both worlds with a pre-packaged, high performing search and delivery platform that they can quickly and cost effectively customize to their very specific business and user needs. Algolia Summer ‘19 is another step in advancing our mission.

Thank you to our customers who provide valuable, ongoing feedback directly, as well as through developer forums and our customer success team. It is your ongoing partnership and trust in us to listen and act that drives the innovation of our 120+ engineers worldwide. To learn more about Algolia’s Summer ‘19 release, please check out our on-demand Algolia Summer ‘19 webinar at www.algolia.com/webinar/summer-19, reach out to your Algolia Customer Success manager, or visit www.algolia.com/products/whats-new/.

Finally, thank you to our product management and development teams. It is through your active, ongoing engagement and long hours in product sprints, testing and customer feedback sessions that has enabled Algolia to be the chosen platform by 7,500+ customers to continuously deliver on Now Moments for consumers globally across 70+ languages. Onward to our next milestone!

About the author