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?

facebookfacebooklinkedinlinkedintwittertwittermailmail

We have important news to share about Algolia Places. After careful consideration, we have come to the decision to sunset our Places feature. Our customers will be able to continue to use Places without disruption for the next 18 months, as we want to make sure there is adequate time to find an alternative. However, we will no longer actively invest in the feature.

Originally created in 2014, Algolia Places was a great alternative to Google Places Autocomplete and addressed a market demand for an alternative to the search giant’s offering. Address search is a complex and difficult problem to solve, but our search engine was uniquely capable of solving it and Algolia Places was built as a fast, beautiful, and easy-to-use address autocomplete.

Despite our success with Algolia Places, it came with challenges. Specifically, Places was built with reliance on OpenSteetMap, which is maintained by an open source community. Combined with the fact that mapping the world is a never ending task, this meant that the feature was limited, depending on the country it was searching, especially when trying to include street level accuracy.

At Algolia, we strive to always deliver stellar quality on our products. After a tough and honest assessment of the feature, we realized that Places was not meeting our own bar for the quality we pride ourselves in. We conducted a full analysis of the requirements necessary to address Places shortcomings, and given the existence of better solutions in the market, we came to the difficult decision that it was best to focus our efforts in other product areas. This decision will allow us to invest and move with greater velocity in Algolia key product competencies such as Algolia AI (Algolia AI Fall ‘20 Webinar).

If you are a Places customer, from the entire Algolia team, we’d like to apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you. We’re committed to making the transition as smooth as possible and that’s why we’ll continue to support Places until May 31st 2022. To help get you started, we provided some potential alternatives:

  1. Mapbox
  2. Google Places
  3. Geocode Earth

Please don’t hesitate to contact our support team if you run into transition issues, we’ll do our best to help. Thank you for being a part of the Algolia community.

About the author
Jon Hellam

Recommended Articles

Powered byAlgolia Algolia Recommend

Introducing Algolia Places
product

Vincent Voyer

Engineering Manager

Redesigning our Docs – Part 7 – What's next to come
product

Marie-Laure Thuret

Technical Product Manager

Redesigning our Docs – Part 6 – The processes and logistics of a large scale project
algolia

Maxime Locqueville

DX Engineering Manager