Search by Algolia
Introducing new developer-friendly pricing
algolia

Introducing new developer-friendly pricing

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What is online visual merchandising?
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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 ...

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Introducing the new Algolia no-code data connector platform
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Customer-centric site search trends
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Customer-centric site search trends

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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 ...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

Mobile search UX best practices, part 2: Streamlining search functionality
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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 ...

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Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager

Mobile search UX best practices, part 1: Understanding the challenges
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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 ...

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Teaching English with Zapier and Algolia
engineering

Teaching English with Zapier and Algolia

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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

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Michelle Adams

Chief Revenue Officer at Algolia

What is digital product merchandising?
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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 ...

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Scaling marketplace search with AI
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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 ...

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Chief Product Officer

The changing face of digital merchandising
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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 ...

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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

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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?

What are search-based Applications?
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A search-based application is an app that uses a search engine as its core infrastructure to find and present information from different data sources. 

With a search-based application (SBA), users can enter a keyword or phrase to access different types of data in disparate locations, whether it’s structured, semi-structured, or unstructured. SBA connectors will pull, aggregate, normalize, and present the data in a user-friendly format, even for information from different back-end systems.

 

How search-based applications are used

SBAs support a variety of use cases across different industries. Some important applications include:

Customer service

SBAs can be powerful tools for customer service representatives. Whether used in modern call centers or in-person support desks, SBAs aggregate information from an array of databases to equip customer service reps with information to quickly address customer questions and concerns. For instance, if a customer calls a travel agent with a last-minute travel request, the agent can use an SBA to quickly find information on numerous flights from a variety of airlines to answer their question in real time. 

E-commerce

SBAs are often used to retrieve relevant product information for online shoppers. Online retailers can use SBAs to deliver lightning-fast, highly relevant results for shoppers’ queries. 

Take a fashion website, for example, where users are searching for a wide variety of products across different categories. When the user searches for jeans, the SBA collects results from Calvin Klein, Levi’s, True Religion, and other brands. And if built on a robust search engine, the SBA can recommend related searches, similar products, and even blog content about the latest trends. This delivers a more personalized search experience, enables cross-selling and up-selling, and enhances the overall customer experience. 

Real estate

Both realtors and potential home buyers can benefit from search-based applications when researching real estate properties. SBAs can consolidate results from a variety of common sources for a more comprehensive view of the property. These sources might include different real estate websites, municipality data (for information about schools, parks, etc.), and nearby transportation options; this information, presented in one user-friendly place, gives users all the pertinent information they need to make housing decisions. 

Enterprise Search capabilities

The distributed nature of today’s data landscape means organizations can store information internally, externally, on-premises, in the cloud, or in different geographic regions. An SBA can provide uniform search results from all these places. As a result, consumers can search large business websites and get quick results, no matter where the data is stored. 

 

How search-based applications and Search-as-a-Service work together

A search-as-a-service tool provides the necessary search engine backbone for an SBA. 

The best search as a service tools are not only ready to use out-of-the-box, but also deeply customizable. This allows you to hit the ground running with great search, while continuously tweaking, testing, and improving your own ranking factors based on business needs. 

Search-as-a service tools prioritize reliable infrastructure to prevent downtime and have the capacity to scale with the growth of your SBA. They are also a great base upon which to build an SBA because the provider handles upkeep and management of the search engine itself. With search as a service, you get the benefit of the search providers’ continuous innovation, without tying up your own developer resources along the way. Your developer team need only focus on fine-tuning your SBA, not laying the groundwork for the basic design of the search engine.

For Flexport, a global shipping logistics company, providing the capabilities to let customers quickly track shipments was crucial to improving their user experience. Leveraging the power of a search as a service tool, their application enables users around the world to reliably search multiple indexes for shipment information. Flexport’s search application supports 4 million searches a month with a 3 millisecond average search time. With a search as a service backbone, Flexport’s app grants customers robust visibility into the supply chain, greatly improving the customer experience in the process.

 

Algolia and search-based applications

Search as a service tools like Algolia are key to capitalizing on the business value of SBAs. They let organizations reap the benefits of these technologies without worrying about the underlying maintenance, hardware, and expertise required to consistently use them. Rapid and personalized search built on a reliable distributed search network caters to virtually any use case.

Watch our demo today to see how Algolia can enable uncomparable search for your own website!

About the author
Elliott Gluck

Senior Product Marketing Manager

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