Search by Algolia
What is online retail merchandising? An introduction
e-commerce

What is online retail merchandising? An introduction

Done any shopping on an ecommerce website lately? If so, you know a smooth online shopper experience is not optional ...

Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

5 considerations for Black Friday 2023 readiness
e-commerce

5 considerations for Black Friday 2023 readiness

It’s hard to imagine having to think about Black Friday less than 4 months out from the previous one ...

Piyush Patel

Chief Strategic Business Development Officer

How to increase your sales and ROI with optimized ecommerce merchandising
e-commerce

How to increase your sales and ROI with optimized ecommerce merchandising

What happens if an online shopper arrives on your ecommerce site and: Your navigation provides no obvious or helpful direction ...

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

Mobile search UX best practices, part 3: Optimizing display of search results
ux

Mobile search UX best practices, part 3: Optimizing display of search results

In part 1 of this blog-post series, we looked at app interface design obstacles in the mobile search experience ...

Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

Mobile search UX best practices, part 2: Streamlining search functionality
ux

Mobile search UX best practices, part 2: Streamlining search functionality

In part 1 of this series on mobile UX design, we talked about how designing a successful search user experience ...

Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

Mobile search UX best practices, part 1: Understanding the challenges
ux

Mobile search UX best practices, part 1: Understanding the challenges

Welcome to our three-part series on creating winning search UX design for your mobile app! This post identifies developer ...

Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

Teaching English with Zapier and Algolia
engineering

Teaching English with Zapier and Algolia

National No Code Day falls on March 11th in the United States to encourage more people to build things online ...

Alita Leite da Silva

How AI search enables ecommerce companies to boost revenue and cut costs
ai

How AI search enables ecommerce companies to boost revenue and cut costs

Consulting powerhouse McKinsey is bullish on AI. Their forecasting estimates that AI could add around 16 percent to global GDP ...

Michelle Adams

Chief Revenue Officer at Algolia

What is digital product merchandising?
e-commerce

What is digital product merchandising?

How do you sell a product when your customers can’t assess it in person: pick it up, feel what ...

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

Scaling marketplace search with AI
ai

Scaling marketplace search with AI

It is clear that for online businesses and especially for Marketplaces, content discovery can be especially challenging due to the ...

Bharat Guruprakash

Chief Product Officer

The changing face of digital merchandising
e-commerce

The changing face of digital merchandising

This 2-part feature dives into the transformational journey made by digital merchandising to drive positive ecommerce experiences. Part 1 ...

Reshma Iyer

Director of Product Marketing, Ecommerce

What’s a convolutional neural network and how is it used for image recognition in search?
ai

What’s a convolutional neural network and how is it used for image recognition in search?

A social media user is shown snapshots of people he may know based on face-recognition technology and asked if ...

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

What’s organizational knowledge and how can you make it accessible to the right people?
product

What’s organizational knowledge and how can you make it accessible to the right people?

How’s your company’s organizational knowledge holding up? In other words, if an employee were to leave, would they ...

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

Adding trending recommendations to your existing e-commerce store
engineering

Adding trending recommendations to your existing e-commerce store

Recommendations can make or break an online shopping experience. In a world full of endless choices and infinite scrolling, recommendations ...

Ashley Huynh

Ecommerce trends for 2023: Personalization
e-commerce

Ecommerce trends for 2023: Personalization

Algolia sponsored the 2023 Ecommerce Site Search Trends report which was produced and written by Coleman Parkes Research. The report ...

Piyush Patel

Chief Strategic Business Development Officer

10 ways to know it’s fake AI search
ai

10 ways to know it’s fake AI search

You think your search engine really is powered by AI? Well maybe it is… or maybe not.  Here’s a ...

Michelle Adams

Chief Revenue Officer at Algolia

Cosine similarity: what is it and how does it enable effective (and profitable) recommendations?
ai

Cosine similarity: what is it and how does it enable effective (and profitable) recommendations?

You looked at this scarf twice; need matching mittens? How about an expensive down vest? You watched this goofy flick ...

Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

What is cognitive search, and what could it mean for your business?
ai

What is cognitive search, and what could it mean for your business?

“I can’t find it.”  Sadly, this conclusion is often still part of the modern enterprise search experience. But ...

Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

Looking for something?

Inside GrowthHackers.com’s Implementation of Algolia
facebookfacebooklinkedinlinkedintwittertwittermailmail

We interviewed Dylan La Com, Growth Product Manager at Qualaroo & GrowthHackers.com, about their Algolia implementation experience.

growthacker

What role did search play at GrowthHackers before the Algolia implementation?

When we launched our community site GrowthHackers.com in October 2013, search was admittedly an afterthought for us. GrowthHackers is a social-voting site where marketers, founders, and product-people can share and discuss growth-related content. At launch, it was unclear what role search would have on the site. GrowthHackers is built on WordPress, and with that comes WordPress’ standard search functionality. What WP search does is append an additional keyword or phrase parameter to its typical post query and load a new page with the results. WP search only indexed the outbound URLs of the articles our members submitted, and this made finding specific content difficult.

Why did you want to give search an update on GrowthHackers?

We started hearing about our lack of a solid search feature from some of our more active users. One of our members even put together a slide presentation to prove just how useless our search was [check it out here]. At the same time, GrowthHackers was becoming more than just a way to stay up-to-date on the best growth articles, it was becoming the place to get answers: an encyclopedia for growth-related information. Search volume at this time was peaking in the mid-hundreds per week. We needed a search feature that could support this evolving use-case.

Why did you choose Algolia?

We looked at several search solutions before trying Algolia, including Swiftype, WP Search (plugin), and Srch2. All are great solutions, but ultimately, we went with Algolia because they had the right mix of features: Their integration was simple, the documentation was thorough, and there were plenty of starter templates. I knew it was a good sign when, while looking their GitHub repository, I found they had a demo site built with search that worked very similar to how we hoped ours would work, complete with real-time results, typo-tolerance, and filters. The Algolia team was incredibly helpful getting us set up and was there each step of the way through the integration process, providing resources and best practices for creating a truly top-notch search experience.

Tell me a little about how the new search works.

Our primary use of Algolia is to store and index user submitted content, and provide real-time search in our growing database of growth-related articles, questions, videos and slides. The majority of what we index is article titles and URLs–strings which are generally small. Visitors to our site often come with specific growth-related questions and use our search to find answers quickly. For example, someone interested in learning best practices for running Twitter ads could type in “Twitter ad” and within milliseconds see dozens of articles and discussions related to maximizing ROI for Twitter ads. Using Algolia’s admin dashboard, we’re able to set ranking priorities based on the number of votes and comments of each article, and make sure the top results are the most relevant. So, the visitor who searches “Twitter ad” is shown articles with the highest mix of votes and comments. Algolia took the search ranking process and wrapped it in a clean and simple interface that allows anyone, regardless of their experience with search, to easily adjust and manipulate.

One of the challenges we faced during the integration process was understanding how to keep our main database synced and up to date with our Algolia index. User submitted content on GrowthHackers changes often as users interact with the content. Each post once submitted may receive upvotes and comments from members in the community. Each post also has a wiki-style summary field that can be edited by community members. Lastly, posts can have several states, including published, pending and trashed. In order to ensure our content on Algolia mirrored the content in our database, we set up a job queue and a cron process to periodically push updates to our Algolia index. This has been working quite well for us.

How has the new search impacted engagement?

We released the new search mid-February, and since the release we’ve seen search volume increase 4-5X. Of course there are several factors at play here, including increased traffic volume and better search bar placement, but it is clear that Algolia’s search features have contributed to an impressive increase in search engagement. On average, visitors who utilize search view 2-3X more pages per session and spend 5-6X longer on the site than those who don’t search. Algolia’s analytics dashboard provides us with an incredible glimpse of visitor intent on our site by showing us the queries visitors are searching for, and trend lines to show popularity over time. With this data, we’re able to better understand how our visitors want to use our site, and make better decisions about how to organize the content.

Moving forward, we’re hoping to implement Algolia’s search filters to provide even better ways to access content on our site. We’re excited to have such a powerful tool in our stack and hope to experiment with new ways to provide search functionality throughout GrowthHackers.

About the author
Maxime

Recommended Articles

Powered byAlgolia Algolia Recommend

The (almost) ultimate guide to site search
product

Ivana Ivanovic

Senior Content Strategist

Why is site search so essential in today's digital economy?
product

Jon Silvers

Director, Thought Leadership Marketing

Deploying Algolia to Search on more than 2 Million Products
algolia

Maxime