From Windsurfing to Venue Search: Great Search Implementations

Want to show off what you’ve built with Algolia? The Show and Tell category on our Community Forum is a great place to gain visibility for your project and get feedback at the same time. Our 1,100 community members actively swap stories of success and overcoming obstacles on their projects.

We ? our community and enjoy seeing the many ways developers are building with Algolia, including the great search experiences built within large enterprises, small business, and those midnight-oil burning side projects that include massive amounts of creativity and originality.

Today, we’ll highlight recent posts to the Show and Tell category so you can see some great ways to implement search.

Digging into PHP’s #internal mailing list

Community member Mattieu Napoli built externals.io as a way to give PHP’s #internal mailing list a new level of accessibility. The site uses an Algolia InstantSearch to afford the user threaded views, search and up/down voting to enhance the UX. Externals.io also features highlighting and inline results in a responsive manner.

See Externals.io on ProductHunt and Algolia’s Community Forum.

Finding the right windsurfing equipment

Built by Spanish developer Kikobeats, windtoday.co is a marketplace to find deals on windsurfing equipment. Windtoday.co enables visitors to find windsurfing goods based on category, brand, condition, and more, using great features like type-ahead search and facets. Also, for those on mobile, Kiko recently introduced a mobile version of windtoday.co using react-instantsearch.

 

Powering philanthropic giving with Grantmakers.io

Grantmakers.io is a site intended to provide live search, summary data and rich profiles for 71,042 US-based foundations. Developer Chad Kruse built Grantmakers.io with Algolia, Jekyll and GitHub Pages in this great example of a search implementation. Even better, Chad has open sourced everything on GitHub for others to learn, hack and build upon.

Uniting blog content and e-commerce sales through search

Often times it’s hard for companies to find a way to tie content marketing and ecommerce sales together. With AskFrannie (an essential oils website), developer Rolondo Garcia built a custom WordPress plug-in that uses product search at the bottom of articles, and invites the visitor to click to an online catalog of products. This method is great because it matches reader intent with relevant products in a casual way. That is, if a reader has read an entire article on, say, essential oils, they’re more likely to have a desire to see products presented in a relevant plug-in that a banner ad on the site.

Find event space at hotels, restaurants and activity spaces

Ask any event manager and they’ll tell you that finding the right event space at the right location can be very time consuming. Bizly.com aims to solve the problem by enabling a curated venue search in major cities across the United States. Powered by optimized SQL queries, Laravel Scout and Algolia, Biz.ly’s search is lightning-fast and very rich.

Let the community see what you’ve built

Feeling inspired by these Show and Tell examples? Head on over and share your post. An ideal post describes how the search works, the Algolia libraries you’re using, and other parts of the stack including languages, frameworks and APIs. The community also loves screenshots and a link to your project. We look forward to seeing what you’ve built!