Search by Algolia
What is a B2B marketplace?
e-commerce

What is a B2B marketplace?

It’s no secret that B2B (business-to-business) transactions have largely migrated online. According to Gartner, by 2025, 80 ...

Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

3 strategies for B2B ecommerce growth: key takeaways from B2B Online - Chicago
e-commerce

3 strategies for B2B ecommerce growth: key takeaways from B2B Online - Chicago

Twice a year, B2B Online brings together industry leaders to discuss the trends affecting the B2B ecommerce industry. At the ...

Elena Moravec

Director of Product Marketing & Strategy

Deconstructing smart digital merchandising
e-commerce

Deconstructing smart digital merchandising

This is Part 2 of a series that dives into the transformational journey made by digital merchandising to drive positive ...

Benoit Reulier
Reshma Iyer

Benoit Reulier &

Reshma Iyer

The death of traditional shopping: How AI-powered conversational commerce changes everything
ai

The death of traditional shopping: How AI-powered conversational commerce changes everything

Get ready for the ride: online shopping is about to be completely upended by AI. Over the past few years ...

Aayush Iyer

Director, User Experience & UI Platform

What is B2C ecommerce? Models, examples, and definitions
e-commerce

What is B2C ecommerce? Models, examples, and definitions

Remember life before online shopping? When you had to actually leave the house for a brick-and-mortar store to ...

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

What are marketplace platforms and software? Why are they important?
e-commerce

What are marketplace platforms and software? Why are they important?

If you imagine pushing a virtual shopping cart down the aisles of an online store, or browsing items in an ...

Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

What is an online marketplace?
e-commerce

What is an online marketplace?

Remember the world before the convenience of online commerce? Before the pandemic, before the proliferation of ecommerce sites, when the ...

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

10 ways AI is transforming ecommerce
e-commerce

10 ways AI is transforming ecommerce

Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer just the stuff of scary futuristic movies; it’s recently burst into the headlines ...

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

AI as a Service (AIaaS) in the era of "buy not build"
ai

AI as a Service (AIaaS) in the era of "buy not build"

Imagine you are the CTO of a company that has just undergone a massive decade long digital transformation. You’ve ...

Sean Mullaney

CTO @Algolia

By the numbers: the ROI of keyword and AI site search for digital commerce
product

By the numbers: the ROI of keyword and AI site search for digital commerce

Did you know that the tiny search bar at the top of many ecommerce sites can offer an outsized return ...

Jon Silvers

Director, Digital Marketing

Using pre-trained AI algorithms to solve the cold start problem
ai

Using pre-trained AI algorithms to solve the cold start problem

Artificial intelligence (AI) has quickly moved from hot topic to everyday life. Now, ecommerce businesses are beginning to clearly see ...

Etienne Martin

VP of Product

Introducing Algolia NeuralSearch
product

Introducing Algolia NeuralSearch

We couldn’t be more excited to announce the availability of our breakthrough product, Algolia NeuralSearch. The world has stepped ...

Bernadette Nixon

Chief Executive Officer and Board Member at Algolia

AI is eating ecommerce
ai

AI is eating ecommerce

The ecommerce industry has experienced steady and reliable growth over the last 20 years (albeit interrupted briefly by a global ...

Sean Mullaney

CTO @Algolia

Semantic textual similarity: a game changer for search results and recommendations
product

Semantic textual similarity: a game changer for search results and recommendations

As an ecommerce professional, you know the importance of providing a five-star search experience on your site or in ...

Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

What is hashing and how does it improve website and app search?
ai

What is hashing and how does it improve website and app search?

Hashing.   Yep, you read that right.   Not hashtags. Not golden, crisp-on-the-outside, melty-on-the-inside hash browns ...

Catherine Dee

Search and Discovery writer

Conference Recap: ECIR23 Take-aways
engineering

Conference Recap: ECIR23 Take-aways

We’re just back from ECIR23, the leading European conference around Information Retrieval systems, which ran its 45th edition in ...

Paul-Louis Nech

Senior ML Engineer

What is a neural network and how many types are there?
ai

What is a neural network and how many types are there?

Your grandfather wears those comfy slipper-y shoes all day, every day, and they’re starting to get holes in ...

Vincent Caruana

Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

10 reasons AI search is the next big thing
ai

10 reasons AI search is the next big thing

Every time I look at the news, there is another article about the race to build new search and discovery ...

Michelle Adams

Chief Revenue Officer at Algolia

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 our new navigation
product

Craig Williams

Director of Product Design & Research

How Algolia uses AI to deliver smarter search
ai

Julien Lemoine

Co-founder & former CTO at Algolia

API Documentation 2.0: From Browsing to Search
product

Peter Villani

Sr. Tech & Business Writer