Concertwith.me’s Competitive Edge: A Revamped Search UX with Algolia

There are a lot of music discovery apps on the market, yet sifting through concert listings is anything but seamless. That’s why Cyprus-based startup Concertwith.me aims to make finding local concerts and festivals as intuitive as possible. Automatically showing upcoming events in your area, the site offers personalized recommendations based on your preferences and your Facebook friends’ favorited music. Covering over 220,000 events globally, the site uses Algolia to offer meaningful results for visitors who are also looking for something different.

Founder Vit Myshlaev admits that concert sites often share the same pool of information. The differentiator is how that information is presented. “The biggest advantage one can have is user experience,” he explains. “There’s information out there, but do users find it? The reason that people don’t go to cool concerts is that they still don’t know about them!”

As an example, he showed me one of the largest live music discovery sites on the web. Searching for an artist required navigating a convoluted maze of links before pulling up irrelevant results. “Users have to type in queries without autocomplete, typo-tolerance, or internationalization. They have to scroll through a long list of answers and click on paginated links. That’s not what people want in 2014,” said Myshlaev.

To simplify search and make the results more relevant, Concertwith.me used our API. “We got a lot of user feedback for natural search,” Myshlaev wrote. Now visitors can search for artists and concerts instantly. With large user bases in the United States, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Russia and Poland, Concertwith.me also benefits from Algolia’s multi-lingual search feature. “We’ve localized our app to many countries. For example, you can search in Russian or for artists that are Russian, and results will still come up,” says Myshlaev.

For users with a less targeted idea of what they’re looking for, Concertwith.me implemented structured search via faceting. “We also realized that some visitors don’t know what they want. Algolia search helps them find answers to questions like, Where will my favorite artist perform? How much do tickets cost? Are there any upcoming shows?”

Concertwith.me’s goal is to reduce informational noise so that users can find and discover music as soon as possible. The start up experimented with a number of other search technologies before reading an article about us on Intercom.io, which inspired Myshlaev. “When I saw what Algolia could do, I knew that this was the competitive edge I was looking for.”

Want to build a search bar with multi-category auto-completion like Concertwith.me? Learn how through our tutorial.