Today we’re excited to release Algolia Places, a fast and easy way to turn any HTML input into an address autocomplete.
One of our core missions at Algolia is to improve search-related user experiences. Address forms were high on our list because they’re difficult to build and often represent a critical step in user flows like sign up and check out. Our goal with Algolia Places is to provide something that’s both easy for developers to integrate and enjoyable for visitors to use. It’s also highly customizable and can be enriched with additional data sources.
Algolia Places is packaged as a simple, lightweight JavaScript library and is available on npm and jsDelivr. You can find comprehensive documentation and live examples on the Algolia Places website.
Beautiful by default
At Algolia we try to build tools with sensible design defaults. The Algolia Places JavaScript library displays a modern and clean dropdown menu from the moment you install it. A few lines of CSS are all you need to customize it to the exact look and feel of your site. All of the typo-tolerance & highlighting capabilities of the Algolia search API are already built in.
Easy to use & easy to extend
Here’s a snippet of code you can use to add Algolia Places to any <input> element on your site. No prior setup or API key required.
In some cases, you’ll want to customize the type of data that is returned and how it is presented. Algolia Places exposes additional configuration options that allow you to:
- Restrict search to specific countries.
- Restrict search to specific types of places (e.g. country, city, address).
- Search for and retrieve localized place names.
Combine places with search results
Algolia Places is compatible with the autocomplete.js library. You can easily build interfaces that combine address search results with other results from autocomplete.js data sources, including Algolia indices. Here’s an example. The Cities section contains results from Places and the Vacation Rentals section contains results from a conventional Algolia index.
Algolia Places is also compatible with instantsearch.js, a library for building full-page search-as-you-type experiences. See the advanced examples to learn more.
Try it now
Algolia Places is free up to 1,000 requests per day. This should be enough to get familiar with the service and deploy smaller applications to production.
Contact us at places@algolia.com if you’d like to use Algolia Places on a larger scale. We’re happy to discuss increased quotas or chat with you about custom plans.
Like many of our projects, Algolia Places is open source. The Github repository has everything you need to open issues, have conversations and submit pull requests. Contributions from beginners and experts are all welcome.
What’s next?
We’re continuing to enrich the underlying data and add more features. We’re working on a detailed blog post about how we built Algolia Places with OpenStreetMap and GeoNames.
In the meantime we’re excited to get your feedback and hear about your experiences!
