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?

OneSignal Builds Hacker News Notifications With a Little Help From Algolia

Oct 27th 2015 engineering

OneSignal Builds Hacker News Notifications With a Little Help From Algolia
facebookfacebooklinkedinlinkedintwittertwittermailmail

The Algolia community is one of our strongest assets, and we love when customers tackle projects with our technology in unexpected ways. OneSignal recently reached out to us to share how they used Algolia’s Hacker News Search API to create a demo of their notification platform, and it’s pretty awesome. OneSignal CEO George Deglin joins us for a guest post to explain how they used Algolia to spread the word on the capabilities of Web Push and OneSignal.


At OneSignal, we help mobile and web developer send smarter and more effective push notifications to their users. Our tools make it easy for developers to schedule, localize, A/B test, and monitor the notifications they send.

In late 2014, the World Wide Web Consortium published a Recommendation of HTML5. Among many impressive features, the one that stood out the most to us was Web Push notifications. Finally, web developers were being given a much better alternative to e-mail for re-engaging their visitors.

Earlier this year, Google Chrome was the first browser to publicly launch Web Push support. We were right there with them, announcing our support for this new technology just days later.

We knew we couldn’t simply launch and wait for clients to sign up. Nearly every developer we talked to had no idea that websites could even send push notifications now. We had to find an effective way to demonstrate our technology to thousands of web developers at once, and there’s no better place to do that than Hacker News.

To get upvotes on Hacker News, we’d have to create a demonstration that appealed to readers and wasn’t self-promotional fluff. With the help of Algolia, we found a perfect solution.

Instead of simply talking about our launch of Web Push support, we built a demo that provides real value to Hacker News readers.

We stumbled upon Algolia’s easy-to-use Hacker News Search API after seeking out an easy way to identify trending Hacker News Stories. Next, we created an Algolia query to identify Hacker News stories that received over 250 upvotes. Finally, we would use Web Push to deliver notifications of these stories to users who visited the site and opted-in. Simply by combining the two with a script that would run every 5 minutes, we had built a push notification system for Hacker News that required nothing but the Chrome web browser!

For the developers out there, here’s the code we used.

Our efforts were a success! After posting the story on Hacker News, it quickly received enough upvotes to briefly trend on the front page. Thousands of developers learned about the potential of Web Push and how OneSignal can help them get started with it.

Find the right tutorial for your needs

About the author
Guillaume Dumortier

Recommended Articles

Powered byAlgolia Algolia Recommend

Reveal the Hacker Within: Build a Better Search Experience for Free with Algolia’s new Hacker Plan
product

Nicolas Dessaigne

Co-founder & board member at Algolia

New experimental version of Hacker News Search built with Algolia
product

kevin

Redesigning Our Docs - Part 3 - The UX/UI Phase
ux

Nicolas Meuzard

Product Designer