Search by Algolia
Feature Spotlight: Query Rules
product

Feature Spotlight: Query Rules

You’re running an ecommerce site for an electronics retailer, and you’re seeing in your analytics that users keep ...

Jaden Baptista

Technical Writer

An introduction to transformer models in neural networks and machine learning
ai

An introduction to transformer models in neural networks and machine learning

What do OpenAI and DeepMind have in common? Give up? These innovative organizations both utilize technology known as transformer models ...

Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

What’s the secret of online merchandise management? Giving store merchandisers the right tools
e-commerce

What’s the secret of online merchandise management? Giving store merchandisers the right tools

As a successful in-store boutique manager in 1994, you might have had your merchandisers adorn your street-facing storefront ...

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

New features and capabilities in Algolia InstantSearch
engineering

New features and capabilities in Algolia InstantSearch

At Algolia, our business is more than search and discovery, it’s the continuous improvement of site search. If you ...

Haroen Viaene

JavaScript Library Developer

Feature Spotlight: Analytics
product

Feature Spotlight: Analytics

Analytics brings math and data into the otherwise very subjective world of ecommerce. It helps companies quantify how well their ...

Jaden Baptista

Technical Writer

What is clustering?
ai

What is clustering?

Amid all the momentous developments in the generative AI data space, are you a data scientist struggling to make sense ...

Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

What is a vector database?
product

What is a vector database?

Fashion ideas for guest aunt informal summer wedding Funny movie to get my bored high-schoolers off their addictive gaming ...

Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

Unlock the power of image-based recommendation with Algolia’s LookingSimilar
engineering

Unlock the power of image-based recommendation with Algolia’s LookingSimilar

Imagine you're visiting an online art gallery and a specific painting catches your eye. You'd like to find ...

Raed Chammam

Senior Software Engineer

Empowering Change: Algolia's Global Giving Days Impact Report
algolia

Empowering Change: Algolia's Global Giving Days Impact Report

At Algolia, our commitment to making a positive impact extends far beyond the digital landscape. We believe in the power ...

Amy Ciba

Senior Manager, People Success

Retail personalization: Give your ecommerce customers the tailored shopping experiences they expect and deserve
e-commerce

Retail personalization: Give your ecommerce customers the tailored shopping experiences they expect and deserve

In today’s post-pandemic-yet-still-super-competitive retail landscape, gaining, keeping, and converting ecommerce customers is no easy ...

Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

Algolia x eTail | A busy few days in Boston
algolia

Algolia x eTail | A busy few days in Boston

There are few atmospheres as unique as that of a conference exhibit hall: the air always filled with an indescribable ...

Marissa Wharton

Marketing Content Manager

What are vectors and how do they apply to machine learning?
ai

What are vectors and how do they apply to machine learning?

To consider the question of what vectors are, it helps to be a mathematician, or at least someone who’s ...

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

Why imports are important in JS
engineering

Why imports are important in JS

My first foray into programming was writing Python on a Raspberry Pi to flicker some LED lights — it wasn’t ...

Jaden Baptista

Technical Writer

What is ecommerce? The complete guide
e-commerce

What is ecommerce? The complete guide

How well do you know the world of modern ecommerce?  With retail ecommerce sales having exceeded $5.7 trillion worldwide ...

Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

Data is king: The role of data capture and integrity in embracing AI
ai

Data is king: The role of data capture and integrity in embracing AI

In a world of artificial intelligence (AI), data serves as the foundation for machine learning (ML) models to identify trends ...

Alexandra Anghel

Director of AI Engineering

What are data privacy and data security? Why are they  critical for an organization?
product

What are data privacy and data security? Why are they critical for an organization?

Imagine you’re a leading healthcare provider that performs extensive data collection as part of your patient management. You’re ...

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

Achieving digital excellence: Algolia's insights from the GDS Retail Digital Summit
e-commerce

Achieving digital excellence: Algolia's insights from the GDS Retail Digital Summit

In an era where customer experience reigns supreme, achieving digital excellence is a worthy goal for retail leaders. But what ...

Marissa Wharton

Marketing Content Manager

AI at scale: Managing ML models over time & across use cases
ai

AI at scale: Managing ML models over time & across use cases

Just a few years ago it would have required considerable resources to build a new AI service from scratch. Of ...

Benoit Perrot

VP, Engineering

Looking for something?

facebookfacebooklinkedinlinkedintwittertwittermailmail

Developers build productivity tools not only as part of their trade but for the love of the game. The game being to reduce the number of tasks they (and their colleagues) have to do, to clear the way for the more demanding work of building great apps. Their creativity behind these often great productivity tools comes out of an instinctual distaste for repetitive tasks.

For example …

A developer-friend recently confessed to me that she can be lazy sometimes. “Shamefully lazy,” she said. “And I’m not alone. I’ve made a career out of being lazy.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond. Here’s a highly successful tech wizard — a guru of tech forums and events, with large followings on Twitter and Github —and she’s telling me she’s lazy.

“I sometimes get this powerful surge of energy where I can move tall buildings and create cool programs that do tedious programming tasks for me. Then I can spend more time doing my actual job–creating apps that make life easier for the rest of the world, with headphones.”

I’m beginning to understand. “How often does this powerful lazy energy occur?”

“Every day. I write code every day that performs small tasks for me. I never tire of coming up with new ideas and spending day and night making them come true.”

Thus, the developer mindset.

Here at Algolia, almost every week, one of the team shows up with a “side” project that wows everyone and is immediately adopted into our daily routines as a (sometimes open source) productivity tool

And they tell us it was simple to do. I’m guessing they just needed that momentary lapse into career-making laziness… I mean, productivity.

They build desktop, web, and mobile apps for windows, apple, and android. Their apps manage to-do lists and workflows, improve task management. Their code leverages Slack, Google Chrome extensions, and social media to send notifications, create collaboration tools, and automate docs contributions. The list goes on.
But let’s have them tell you about it. Here’s 10 blogs they’ve written describing their best productivity tools and cool apps.

Productivity apps and tools

We have many offices in different parts of the world, which means different time zones, so it’s easy to feel lost and disconnected from each other’s daily lives. We wanted to create something to “cheat” the distance, something for people to feel more like they belong to one company. The idea was to use our office TV screens to publish people’s birthdays, hiring anniversaries, new hires, events and meetups, candidate onsite interviews, and job openings—centralizing the company’s highlights of the week. The screens are now set up in every office!

It‘s a very common practice and a very bad idea to send sensitive information over Slack or email. The challenge is to create a more secure platform that is also easy to use in order to invite adoption. With the help of my colleagues, I built a self-destructing messenger.

I wanted to automate the process of internal package delivery as much as possible, from scanning the label to notifying people on Slack. Integrating Algolia’s search engine with Google Vision’s OCR API, I found a faster, easier, and scalable way to help our office manager dispatch packages to our growing staff. 

Productivity plug-ins

We decided to build an Algolia Netlify plug-in to automate indexing for search. Our main objective was to trigger our Crawler to browse the website after each deployment, to build a ready-to-use Algolia index. The result was a Netlify plug-in that made it easy to add search on your Netlify website, allowing you to add an Algolia search experience in just a few lines of code. 

The desire to automate everything is pretty common, especially with developers: why should I waste my time doing the same operation countless times? That desire is at the base of the process that led to the making of an Atom plugin: an autocomplete search that allows importing packages from NPM quickly, with only a few keystrokes. 

My colleague and I were thinking: Algolia has a .NET API Client, and Unity supports C# as a scripting language–Why not try to bring them together? Our idea was to implement a search-as-you-type experience inside a Unity game scene. We decided to create a Marketplace, a common use case for searching within a game.

A CMS normally doesn’t come with search functionality. It’s not easy to build even a minimal search function on top of it by yourself, let alone something that includes important features like typo tolerance and faceting. This is what our Algolia plug-in does: it adds a flexible and feature-rich search functionality on top of your CMS.

Voice Technology

I wanted to use my voice to interact with the world. And, I wanted to stop typing so much. We created the Algolia Alexa Skills Kit Adapter, a small JavaScript library, intended for use on Amazon Lambda, that provides tools for integrating Alexa and Algolia, as well as a framework for structuring your Alexa skills. 

What would a search interface be without a search box? After a few weeks of exploration, I created an app that gave music advice through a conversation. I called it “Musicologist”. This is the story of how I built it, hoping to give you an idea of what kinds of new search interfaces are coming to the fore and how you could start building them yourself.

And last but not least ..

On March 31st, just in time for April Fool’s day, we announced our CSS API Client, that replicated a search engine with only CSS. While it was only a joke in the spirit of April Fool’s, it was a lot of fun to make, and also a lot of fun to see it in the wild. Warning: Please don’t try this at home or in production!

About the author
Peter Villani

Sr. Tech & Business Writer

linkedinmediumtwitter

Recommended Articles

Powered byAlgolia Algolia Recommend

Post-Exit Year in Review
algolia

Ciprian Borodescu

AI Product Manager | On a mission to help people succeed through the use of AI

Advice to women in tech from Algolia's female leaders: Part I
algolia

Ivana Ivanovic

Senior Content Strategist

We Built an Atom Plugin to Find and Install Any NPM Module
engineering

Gianluca Bargelli

Software Developer & Pizza Lover 🍕