Search by Algolia
Introducing new developer-friendly pricing
algolia

Introducing new developer-friendly pricing

Hey there, developers! At Algolia, we believe everyone should have the opportunity to bring a best-in-class search experience ...

Nick Vlku

VP of Product Growth

What is online visual merchandising?
e-commerce

What is online visual merchandising?

Eye-catching mannequins. Bright, colorful signage. Soothing interior design. Exquisite product displays. In short, amazing store merchandising. For shoppers in ...

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

Introducing the new Algolia no-code data connector platform
engineering

Introducing the new Algolia no-code data connector platform

Ingesting data should be easy, but all too often, it can be anything but. Data can come in many different ...

Keshia Rose

Staff Product Manager, Data Connectivity

Customer-centric site search trends
e-commerce

Customer-centric site search trends

Everyday there are new messages in the market about what technology to buy, how to position your company against the ...

Piyush Patel

Chief Strategic Business Development Officer

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

Looking for something?

Increase relevance with Personalization from Algolia
facebookfacebooklinkedinlinkedintwittertwittermailmail

Evolving from “one size fits all”

The web has historically been a centralized model for businesses to advertise and sell – one online destination for many to come to access content. Visit any of your favorite websites and you would see the same content as another user clear across the state or country. This standardization ensured a consistent experience whether a user is visiting to check sports scores or the latest performance of the stock market.

As the web evolved, so too did the user experience as this “one size fits all” approach was no longer the optimal strategy. From Facebook’s News Feed to YouTube & Netflix recommending videos to watch next based on your prior view history, the homogeneous content strategy began to change. Other businesses began to advance as well terms of how they matched users to the products & experiences they desired, leading to an improved experience.

A more personal approach

At Algolia, we have been focused on personalization for a while now, constantly thinking about how we bring customized search opportunities to our customers. Today, we’re excited to release a brand new version of Personalization, which lets customers use a list of inputs about a user’s behavior to influence the content that this person is going to see. More specifically, we now allow businesses to take a wide range of individual online behavior & preferences, and optimize the search ranking strategy accordingly to show more relevant results. This is accomplished by using a list of inputs about a user’s online behavior to influence the content that this individual will see. While there are many different types of general digital personalization tools (for dynamic website content, email layout etc.) our Algolia solution specifically focuses on search and discovery.

How to personalize

So how, and more importantly what can be personalized? The two most prominent types are personalized search and personalized lists. Personalized search applies to changing the search results to match the profile of a user once a search is performed. A personalized list by contrast displays a list of objects that match the profile of a user, but are outside of the search (think the “Recommended for You” choices Netflix provides upon entering your user account). While there are a number of inputs to potentially track, we are starting with the following initial events as potential inputs to personalize someone’s experience:

  • Views: If a user has seen a product page, or a landing page
  • Clicks: What a user has clicked on
  • Conversion: When a user adds an item to its cart, makes a purchase, watches a video, reads an article, etc.

It is also worth mentioning that there are two big varieties of personalization strategies, that may or may not be combined together: reinforcement & discovery. Reinforcement relates to pushing items that you have directly interacted with individually (i.e you bookmarked a product) or as a group (you visited a landing page with multiple products on them) to try and increase the accuracy of results you are seeing.

Discovery by contrast is focused on highlighting items that are related to the items a user has directly interacted with. This works especially well for items that are paired together (need a case to compliment the new cell phone you just bought?) and focuses on discovering interesting items you might otherwise not have seen. All of these specifics are designed to let our users better control how the ranking will be impacted, using a mathematical approach to let businesses prioritize accordingly. While there are many other variables to track, we will look to potentially add more through future releases and iterations of the product.

One of the key benefits to our new Personalization release is how easy it is to configure and get up and running quickly. Most personalization strategies take a lot of work and development resources to get set up, and once live, it becomes even more burdensome to gain visibility and insight into your relevance strategy. With Algolia, all you need to do is set your event weights (the relative importance of each) and start to send us the events, and we do the rest. Best of all, once you’re live, you can iterate on your formula and fine tune it to your needs in an instant through our dashboard.

Our launch partners

Helping us to launch Personalization are a select set of beta users who tested to provide critical feedback. One of our beta users is Videdressing, who has seen value in getting a personalized experience up and running quickly, as Product Manager David Piry notes “One of the great things about Personalization with Algolia is how easy it is to get set-up and running – there’s not a ton of development work, just using data you are already collecting.” Personalization solves the issue of a “one size fits all approach” and increases relevancy by displaying content and objects your users are more likely to be interested in.

Want to learn more? Click here for more details.

About the author
Elliott Gluck

Senior Product Marketing Manager

linkedin

Recommended Articles

Powered byAlgolia Algolia Recommend

Search personalization 101: how to capitalize on personalized search and discovery
ux

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

E-commerce personalization: pitfalls, tradeoffs, and solutions
e-commerce

Eunice Lee
Matthew Foyle

Eunice Lee &

Matthew Foyle

The (almost) ultimate guide to site search
product

Ivana Ivanovic

Senior Content Strategist