Search by Algolia
Algolia's search propels 1,000s of retailers to Black Friday success
e-commerce

Algolia's search propels 1,000s of retailers to Black Friday success

In the midst of the Black Friday shopping frenzy, Algolia soared to new heights, setting new records and delivering an ...

Bernadette Nixon

Chief Executive Officer and Board Member at Algolia

Generative AI’s impact on the ecommerce industry
ai

Generative AI’s impact on the ecommerce industry

When was your last online shopping trip, and how did it go? For consumers, it’s becoming arguably tougher to ...

Vincent Caruana

Senior Digital Marketing Manager, SEO

What’s the average ecommerce conversion rate and how does yours compare?
e-commerce

What’s the average ecommerce conversion rate and how does yours compare?

Have you put your blood, sweat, and tears into perfecting your online store, only to see your conversion rates stuck ...

Vincent Caruana

Senior Digital Marketing Manager, SEO

What are AI chatbots, how do they work, and how have they impacted ecommerce?
ai

What are AI chatbots, how do they work, and how have they impacted ecommerce?

“Hello, how can I help you today?”  This has to be the most tired, but nevertheless tried-and-true ...

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

Algolia named a leader in IDC MarketScape
algolia

Algolia named a leader in IDC MarketScape

We are proud to announce that Algolia was named a leader in the IDC Marketscape in the Worldwide General-Purpose ...

John Stewart

VP Corporate Marketing

Mastering the channel shift: How leading distributors provide excellent online buying experiences
e-commerce

Mastering the channel shift: How leading distributors provide excellent online buying experiences

Twice a year, B2B Online brings together America’s leading manufacturers and distributors to uncover learnings and industry trends. This ...

Jack Moberger

Director, Sales Enablement & B2B Practice Leader

Large language models (LLMs) vs generative AI: what’s the difference?
ai

Large language models (LLMs) vs generative AI: what’s the difference?

Generative AI and large language models (LLMs). These two cutting-edge AI technologies sound like totally different, incomparable things. One ...

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

What is generative AI and how does it work?
ai

What is generative AI and how does it work?

ChatGPT, Bing, Bard, YouChat, DALL-E, Jasper…chances are good you’re leveraging some version of generative artificial intelligence on ...

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

Feature Spotlight: Query Suggestions
product

Feature Spotlight: Query Suggestions

Your users are spoiled. They’re used to Google’s refined and convenient search interface, so they have high expectations ...

Jaden Baptista

Technical Writer

What does it take to build and train a large language model? An introduction
ai

What does it take to build and train a large language model? An introduction

Imagine if, as your final exam for a computer science class, you had to create a real-world large language ...

Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

The pros and cons of AI language models
ai

The pros and cons of AI language models

What do you think of the OpenAI ChatGPT app and AI language models? There’s lots going on: GPT-3 ...

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

How AI is transforming merchandising from reactive to proactive
e-commerce

How AI is transforming merchandising from reactive to proactive

In the fast-paced and dynamic realm of digital merchandising, being reactive to customer trends has been the norm. In ...

Lorna Rivera

Staff User Researcher

Top examples of some of the best large language models out there
ai

Top examples of some of the best large language models out there

You’re at a dinner party when the conversation takes a computer-science-y turn. Have you tried ChatGPT? What ...

Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

What are large language models?
ai

What are large language models?

It’s the era of Big Data, and super-sized language models are the latest stars. When it comes to ...

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

Mobile search done right: Common pitfalls and best practices
ux

Mobile search done right: Common pitfalls and best practices

Did you know that 86% of the global population uses a smartphone? The 7 billion devices connected to the Internet ...

Alexandre Collin

Staff SME Business & Optimization - UI/UX

Cloud Native meetup: Observability & Sustainability
engineering

Cloud Native meetup: Observability & Sustainability

The Cloud Native Foundation is known for being the organization behind Kubernetes and many other Cloud Native tools. To foster ...

Tim Carry

Algolia DocSearch is now free for all docs sites
product

Algolia DocSearch is now free for all docs sites

TL;DR Revamp your technical documentation search experience with DocSearch! Previously only available to open-source projects, we're excited ...

Shane Afsar

Senior Engineering Manager

4 questions to ask for relevant search results
product

4 questions to ask for relevant search results

Relevance – it’s what we’re all going for with our search implementations, but it’s so subjective that it ...

Jaden Baptista

Technical Writer

Looking for something?

facebookfacebooklinkedinlinkedintwittertwittermailmail

In today’s world of easily accessible data, privacy is key. But protecting data is often a manual and expensive process requiring extensive planning. Solid, an app designed to help you run easy and effective meetings, faces a unique struggle when it comes to privacy. They have access to large amounts of personal data and need it to be searchable yet secure.

Aligned with their mission to make meetings easy and effective, they needed a way to keep privacy easy and effective while not minimizing any search functionality. So, they called Algolia. 

Thibaut Davoult, Growth Manager at Solid, recently reached out to share the Solid/Algolia experience with us. Here’s what he had to say.


What does Solid do?

Solid is a meetings management app used by managers, employees and freelancers around the world. Our platform has hosted hundreds of thousands of meetings and counting, and clients such as LinkedIn, Dropbox, Deezer and Airbnb trust us with their private data. Solid, in return, places the utmost importance on privacy.

Protecting your data

In fact, privacy is one of the stepping stones for Solid’s success. Meeting invitations can contain very sensitive data. Even meeting names alone can be revealing, so we work hard to prevent any of this info from leaking. And this has been the case from the very beginningWe largely manage to keep privacy in check thanks to deep provider integration. We currently integrate with Office 365 and Google through their OAuth system and rely on ACL to keep users out of others’ meetings.

But we needed search…

The need for a search feature quickly became evident while trying to manage all these meetings. We had a large amount of data and no clear way to organize and find information. Thus, the problem to solve was quite straightforward:

How do we implement a search feature that:

1) Keeps our users’ privacy in check
2) Doesn’t hurt our app’s performance
3) Can be implemented as quickly as possible

We had a few options:

1) Develop a less-satisfying search via MySQL+Redis
2) Implement open source solutions like ElasticSearch or Solr
3) Go with a 3rd party API

The latter seemed like the way to go. Here’s why it seemed like our best option and how we chose Algolia.

Why Algolia?

Algolia is the leading hosted search API and the only one that delivers instant and relevant results from the first keystroke. Once we realized this, it didn’t take long for us to reach out to learn more. What followed, as you’ll see, cemented our decision. We knew it was a no brainer to implement them.

An easy but careless way to keep search performance up would have been to go without a backend proxy so the JavaScript code could directly send requests to the search engine from the end-user browser or device. But that’s not easy. Since JS is executed client side, it would expose all the code and access keys to users, allowing them to search through other meetings. Not very secure. We needed to find a way to secure this information without going through a backend—and secured—proxy.

We recognized that Algolia’s Secured API Keys were the appropriate solution. They allow you to securely apply filtering on the query, done via the back end for optimal security. That means the JS can directly and securely request the Algolia API without any hiccups or slowdowns.

We also needed to add a tagging system to ensure users could and would only access meetings that were meant for them. Each indexed meeting contains a tag array with a list of participants that looks like this: `[“user_xyz”, “user_abc”]`.

When users start a search, their searches are automatically filtered with their associated tags. As a result, they will only be able to search meetings that contain both their keyword AND their user ID. This way, we’re guaranteed not to show anyone else’s results.

  • Tags are associated with the meeting when they are indexed.
  • The back end fixes the tag filters and prepares a session-secured token for the search using Algolia’s php client.
  • The data for search is sent to the front end through a specific endpoint.
  • The JS client uses the token and the filters to directly request the Algolia search endpoint.

Solid also allows users to ignore events on a case-by-case basis. We know you don’t want to see meetings you’ve ignored in your search results, so we filter them out per your settings.

Performance at scale

Could we have done this using other methods such as Elasticsearch? Sure, but at what cost? To get the same performance level and still keep up with security, we would have had to pour quite a bit more resources into the project. Resources, ultimately, that we just don’t have.

While we did all of the above in only five days using Algolia, it would have taken close to three more weeks to complete on Elasticsearch. That’s not even accounting for the maintenance work we would have needed to perform as we processed our initial 500k meetings. This would have been increasingly difficult to scale quickly as we onboard new users. We usually love it when our developers tackle difficult problems (and they do too), but this is just an unnecessary problem to have. But protecting your privacy? That’s a problem that’s right up our alley! And giving you great search? That’s right up Algolia’s!

About the author
Guillaume Dumortier

Start building for free

Create a full-featured search experience in no time.

Get started
Start building for free

Recommended Articles

Powered byAlgolia Algolia Recommend

Mobile search done right: Common pitfalls and best practices
ux

Alexandre Collin

Staff SME Business & Optimization - UI/UX

What to look for in a Search API
product

Benoit Perrot

Director, Engineering

How Algolia uses AI to deliver smarter search
ai

Julien Lemoine

Co-founder & former CTO at Algolia