Search is more than a website feature. It’s mission critical. It drives all forms of discovery and navigation on your site. It delivers customer acquisition and conversions. It’s crucial for revenue growth.
Our 2023 ecommerce site search trends report shows that 50% of businesses see search as a strong revenue driver. Of businesses that have adopted advanced product search and discovery technology, 71% are satisfied or very satisfied with the revenue they have generated from search so far.
7 out of 10 businesses that implemented advanced search capabilities reported increased revenue from those enhancements
Businesses have a wide variety of search solutions to choose from. But not all search is created equal. Choosing the right search solution can make or break your ability to scale your customer experience.
One of the most common questions we get is: how does Algolia compare with search tools built using open source?
Anyone asking knows that great search is a major investment. It takes infrastructure, time, budgets, talented people, and maintenance. Weighing the options is a necessary step.
This ebook is designed to do that. Our goal is to help you work better and save money. Focusing on business value, this ebook compares Algolia and open source search solutions to help you make the best decision for your business case.
Going for gold in consumer-grade search
Let’s face it. Your site visitors are already search experts, and so are you. We’ve all been training ourselves for years on top-of-the-line search capabilities from tech giants like Google and Amazon. Thanks to these industry titans, we instantly know when search is effective. And when it’s not.
When search functions perfectly and powerfully, we don’t even notice it. The results can be so accurate, it’s as if search is reading our minds.
It’s not magic, but hard-won with great technology. With Google, it’s blazing fast, search-as-you-type results. With Amazon, it’s semantic auto-suggest and dynamic enhancements to ease discovery across its vast and growing catalog.
We refer to this type of search as consumer-grade search. It connects people with products, content, and key pieces of structured data. It’s fast, reliable, works on multiple platforms, and provides highly relevant results.
A business imperative to meet sky-high expectations
Wherever users are, they expect consumer-grade search on par with the world’s best. From online shopping to business applications, to content discovery, people want intuitive results, fast.
Businesses expect more from search, too. They’re learning that every millisecond impacts consumer behavior. Even the tiniest differences in latency can lead to lost sales. A study by Deloitte showed that speed correlates to more views, increased spend, and higher conversion rates. In contrast, slow loading times frustrate visitors and drive them away, leaving empty or abandoned carts behind.
To succeed, organizations need to keep pace with their users. The problem is built-in search options on monolithic ecommerce platforms just aren’t cutting it anymore. They can be slow, expensive to customize, and frustrating to configure. The same can be said of search engines built from scratch. As Forrester Research has shown, open source search solutions are overly complex and labor intensive.
Raising the bar with Algolia
Algolia was designed for consumer-grade search from the get-go. It’s the world’s only API-first hybrid search engine built for the modern technology stack. The next section will dig deeper into what that means for your search technology investment, as compared to open source search tools.
It's actually one of the best investments we could've made as a company.
Global director of ecommerce and CRM, luxury sportswear
The Algolia difference vs. open source
Must-haves for consumer-grade search
Ease of implementation
For site visitors
The brilliance of consumer-grade search is anticipating user needs. When search and discovery experiences are intuitive, the interface feels like an extension of our mind. A satisfying experience has to:
- put the user in the driver’s seat
- serve instant, search-as-you-type results in your language of choice
- be spelling agnostic with high typo tolerance
- build a clear, tangible connection between queries and results
- work flawlessly on every platform
This is where Algolia’s AI-enabled features shine brightest. Filters and facets, search as you type capability, and an adjustable scale for typo tolerance (e.g. 3-4 letters off) are implemented out of the box. Dynamic Synonym Suggestions ensure that typing “flip flops” will deliver the same great results as “slides” in a search for summer footwear. Dynamic Re-Ranking identifies trends in queries and clicks and boosts them in results. Federated search and geo search capabilities ensure information is received from multiple sources at once and displayed on maps when useful. Algolia is constantly adding features to ensure searchers get a seamless and engaging experience no matter what they enter in the search bar.
Front end survival kit
Do you have, at minimum:
- Instant, typo tolerant, search as-you-type results
- Results from all your data sources with smart, dynamic suggestions
For your developer team and business users
Algolia makes it easy for developers to deliver that frictionless UX
with simple configurability and schema-less indexing. Onboarding resources, a pre-built dashboard, UI and prepackaged libraries make
it quick and easy to build first-class front end components. No special search expertise? No problem.
With open source, build-from-scratch solutions, it’s another story. Engineering support is necessary to build new features. For example, typo tolerance requires extensive rule-setting and tedious busy work.
Some open source software makes it possible to use a schema-less index, but it’s not the preferred option. Libraries can be insufficient, challenging to use, and supporting documentation is often unavailable or difficult to read. With the right developer skills, things can be done correctly, but updating inventory and correcting product specs can be a headache and take longer.
Back end survival kit
Do you have, at minimum:
- Easy-to-use UX for your business users
- Prepackaged libraries with simple configuration for your dev teams
Speed
Speed is non-negotiable in search. It’s the number one factor determining site success. Even a decade ago, a study revealed that just 100 ms of latency costs Amazon 1% of sales. Forrester Research found that fast search improves the user experience across channels, in-store, in hybrid retail, and on mobile. In a 2020 Deloitte study, a 100 ms speed increase on retail sites lowered bounce rates and increased mobile conversions by 8.4%.
Algolia was built for speed. Every decision was made to eliminate latency at each layer of the stack. For example, instead of sorting results at query time, Algolia pre-sorts them to shorten response time. We use highly distributed architecture on bare-metal servers, which speeds up processing at our end. So does splitting up search and indexing and assigning them different CPU priorities.
Algolia Search is so fast. It’s instant.
Piotr Tuszewicki
Co-Founder, Noski Noski
Less than 10 ms response time for 30.6 billion queries per week with 99.999% uptime makes Algolia the top option for consumer-grade search.
You can achieve similar speeds by building from scratch, but getting there takes months of extensive development and unremitting tuning. Anyone choosing an open source solution needs to deeply understand latency and have a strategy to continuously address it. Even then, the complexity and interdependence of different layers of the stack often results in slower search.
Algolia’s fast right out of the box.
Relevance
Relevance is critical to a satisfying search experience.
Context matters, words matter, who’s searching matters. With so many variables at play, determining which results best match a query gets complicated fast.
Many search engines determine relevance using complex statistical mathematics. They assign a relevance and ranking score to each record in an index based on word counts, proximities, weights, and other variables.
Algolia developed a more intuitive route that reinvents how search engines define relevance. It applies a tie-breaking approach that’s optimized for search on web and mobile. White-box ranking makes the rules and attributes transparent, so the tie-breaking process is easy to understand and improve.
Algolia enables A/B testing to learn what settings are most effective and make changes. Developers and business users can easily change default criteria and adjust search rankings to reflect business priorities, with no coding necessary.
Open source search solutions adopt the statistical approach, but often at a level that can be complex to apply and maintain. For non-coders, solutions can be overly opaque. It’s not easy to determine what rules and attributes produced a given search result. If a searcher types “milk” and “oat milk” ranks higher in the results, a deep dive into the code is necessary to figure out why. Fixing relevance on a single query is tough. With a built-from-scratch search engine, the risk is you’re bound to break something.
Open source search tools don’t include the packaged A/B testing feature that Algolia provides to improve relevance and expand use cases. To learn what resonates with a given search audience, dev teams would need to build the feature themselves or engage third party vendors. All these question marks stall progress and cut into valuable developer time.
Algolia Hierarchy of Relevance
- 1:1 Personalization
Curated experiences tailored to each individual user based on their historical behavior
- Persona segmentation
Anticipate user affinities and proactively tailor results before they take any action
- AI re-ranking
Use all your users activities to automatically boost/bury products at a global level
- Conditional rules
Merchandise with sniper-level precision and redirect to category landing pages
- Custom business ranking
When two records match, use business logic (margin, popularity, etc.) to drive one higher
- Textual relevance
Do the words in a record textually match a query?
Scalability
The world isn't static, and neither is search. Indices need to scale seamlessly to accommodate change — from evolving product catalogs and attributes to multiple sites for new markets in new languages, and for sales surges like Black Friday.
From Black Friday fail to $500M win
One company learned the hard way how essential scalability is for success.
A traffic spike leading up to Black Friday overwhelmed and crashed Gymshark’s site in its third year as a small, self-hosted store.
But that catastrophe was a catalyst to switch to headless architecture with API-first solutions. Using Algolia Search and product recommendations paid off big. Gymshark now generates 20% of its annual revenue around those peak holidays, and reached a milestone in 2020 with $500 million in revenue and 64 million customers served in a billion pageviews.
As a cloud-native, hosted-service, Algolia helps deliver reliability and scalability by solving the infrastructure basics for you. Developers can use Algolia’s simple, agile, and robust API to quickly roll out a customized search experience. As for usage, Algolia scales up and down automatically as search capacity is needed, keeping costs low.
Effortlessly scale capabilities to drive business value
Algolia scales for more than search volume. It empowers tech and business leaders to use search as a launchpad for innovation. Our platform offers tools that help businesses make smart choices about content, search, and index settings.
For instance, Algolia’s Analytics dashboard offers search-related metrics that track your users’ actual search activity. You can discover real search patterns and see which search terms, results, and filters follow or deviate from those patterns.
By using specialized search metrics — like popular searches, no-result rates, or click and search-to-conversion rates — you can ensure that your search implementation is optimized to meet your business goals, be it conversion rates, engagement, scaling, or productivity.
Configuring open source search tools to perform and scale requires major back end expertise and development time. Enabling something as essential as secure, scalable High Availability can be enormously complex. Dev teams can pull together components for building out dashboards, but the piecemeal approach provides insufficient visibility and granularity into indexing and search.
Personalization
Future-proofing with personalization
- AI for personalization increased revenue for 58% of ecommerce and
retail stores
- Personalized search brought customers back for 56% of ecommerce
and retail stores
- 71% of ecommerce and retail stores will make personalization part of
their ecommerce strategy in 2023
Source: Coleman Parkes
It’s about delivering unexpected but relevant content to our visitors to inspire them.
Mike Hoefer
Director of Web Development
A recent study by Elastic revealed that personalization had an impact on 84% of online shoppers. Even more (88%) said that personalized experiences helped keep them on websites longer.
Consumer-grade search has to deliver content that’s suited to individual users. A monolithic ranking strategy is too rigid to achieve that. Rather, modern search needs to incorporate ways to test, optimize, and drive results.
Algolia enables search and discovery personalization that tracks and analyzes user profiles. No specialized expertise is required to gain user insights and tailor content based on preferences and behaviors. On the consumer end, those fine-tuned, unique results pack a punch. They increase engagement, drive conversions, and encourage return visits to your site.
While open source search can enable personalization, there’s a steep learning curve to building it from scratch. Most companies can’t afford the drain on time and developer resources.
How Algolia helps businesses deliver consumer-grade search
In the previous section, we outlined how Algolia compares with open-source search engines. Equipped with that knowledge, here are some important considerations for you and your team:
- Will building and maintaining a complex system from scratch give your company a competitive advantage?
- How much revenue is your company losing because of a less-than-stellar search experience?
- How long can you afford to wait before delivering a cutting-edge user experience?
- Are your dev team’s time and resources better spent on maintaining search or on developing your company’s primary product or service?
In-house development challenges
- Over 50% of businesses couldn’t adapt fast enough to trends
- 2 in 5 lacked the necessary expertise
- Over one-third had insufficient development staff
At Algolia, we devote 100% of our time and resources to developing and innovating a world class search capability for our clients. We think you should be able to focus as much time on your core product as well.
Algolia lets you do this by saving time and resources and delivering results. In the following sections, we’ll show you how our search and discovery solution makes integration flexible, fast, and easy, as compared to open source solutions.
With a ready-made, fast-to-implement solution
We considered Elasticsearch, but building it ourselves would have easily taken 2 to 3 times as long as implementing Algolia. It took maybe a day or two for an initial prototype within our application, and a week or so to develop a production ready version.
Ram Gudavalli
CO-Founder, CTO, Sense
Developers love the versatility of open source tools. The sky’s the limit for what you can build. The problem is, there can be 10 different ways of doing the same thing.
If the end-goal is consumer-grade search, you ultimately have to focus down on your particular use case. Building a ranking formula from scratch and defining a text relevance strategy is a highly specialized skill. To do it using open source software, you’ll need an expert team and lots of time to iterate and test.
When you start with DIY foundations, everything stays DIY. Developers have to tap into their own IT communities or find new ones to learn how to build out particular components and navigate the implementation. The time it takes adds up fast.
With Algolia, companies can go from initial scoping to live implementation in less than a week. A single sprint is enough to deliver a final version. Front end libraries and API clients reduce time to implement by integrating easily and effortlessly into your tech stack. Extensive documentation and client support are available 24/7 to help guide the way.
[Algolia] allowed us to build a website without having to build a backend with a specific database. We can just throw stuff into the index and it works.
Fernando Padilla
Software Engineer @WeWork
With robust infrastructure already in place
Algolia operates 400 clusters in 16 different regions and 70 worldwide data centers. Running our own distributed architecture lets us provide 99.999% Service Level Agreement (SLA) and 100% API uptime.
By managing everything related to search infrastructure, deployments, and back-end upgrades, Algolia helps businesses stay lean and laser-focused on their core offerings.
With open source tools, you’ll need infrastructure, including servers and engineers to operate those servers. Maintaining that infrastructure, including software updates and backward compatibility, will fall to you and your teams.
Rather than taking on excessive infrastructure overheads, future-forward organizations should build cutting-edge business functionality instead.
With security and transparency
With added infrastructure comes added security responsibilities. While securing the software layer of your search solution is possible with open source tools, securing your entire stack requires a dedicated and knowledgeable team.
Get 99% uptime without the cost of a full-time security engineer.
A missed security patch on a large index can leave you open to cyber attack and compromise your customer data.
Furthermore, if you run an open-source search instance through cloud infrastructure, your uptime is limited to what your cloud provider offers in its SLA. AWS’s offer of 99% uptime might sound impressive, but 1% over an entire year translates to major downtime — 3.5 days. Better speed and higher SLA in a homegrown solution require someone working full-time to manage security updates. For most companies, that’s one salary too many spent on search rather than core offerings.
Algolia has a specialized security team that manages all aspects of network defense:
- Ensuring all servers and data centers meet the highest industry security standards
- Managing software upgrades, with no impact on service
- Deploying multi-layer access control to protect infrastructure
- Running continuous security testing through a public bounty program and regular pen tests
- Sharing transparent information about how we build and fix things
- Communicating openly and clearly about any major security matters
We also monitor our API performance in 50 locations worldwide and share the information on our API status page.
With lower engineering costs
The biggest draw of open source tools is their low cost. However, with those savings come hidden operating and maintenance costs that you’ll need to budget and pay for — especially as these can build incrementally over time.
Dodge hidden costs:
- Reduced capacity to innovate
- Endless maintenance
- Slower time to value
- Wasted developer resources
To run and maintain an open source search engine effectively, you’ll need to hire specialized relevance engineers or spend time upskilling your existing team. Both routes will need considerable time and staffing investments.
With Algolia, the initial cost may be higher, but there’s never a need to supplement existing engineering resources. Post-implementation costs are low and entirely predictable.
With a superior developer experience
While Algolia and open source search tools are both popular options, Algolia is simpler for developers of all skill levels to configure, deploy, and innovate. It’s designed so any developer can roll out a highly powerful, advanced search on their own and quickly. Without previous search-building experience, developers building from scratch using open source software can get bogged down in details.
The implementation and maintenance of Algolia was and is extremely easy. We just had to pull an API key and could start powering any experience.
Fernando Padilla
Software Engineer at WeWork
The following Algolia differentiators make it easy to dive in and get to work:
- A working knowledge of JavaScript is sufficient to build most aspects of the UI
- It’s easy to pass data back and forth between API clients and servers
- Algolia maintains API clients for all important programming languages and platforms
- Algolia’s support team members are the same people who build Algolia; they’re easy to talk to and know the product backwards and forwards
- Algolia documentation is written and updated by a dedicated team of developers and technical writers
With opportunities for non-developers
After a brief initiation to the Algolia dashboard, anyone with minimal tech savvy — from product managers, digital strategists, ecommerce marketers, and omnichannel strategists — can understand the relevance formulas and update them as needed. More importantly, they can leverage Algolia’s analytics features for valuable insights into clicks, queries, user behaviors, and search-to-conversion data.
With that opportunity and that knowledge, leaders across the business can impact search and drive critical business KPIs.
With complicated, code-heavy solutions, business-side users have to wait in ticket queues for tech teams to implement changes to search formulas. With Algolia, they’re empowered to take immediate action. Algolia’s capacity to extend search usability to non-developers is a true game changer.
From a time-intensive search
tool to a fast, intuitive one.
Product Manager
Under Armour
With a launchpad for innovation
For open source aficionados, adopting an alternative search tool can feel like a step back. The problem is, the technical demand of internally built search can be a drain on the rest of the organization. Simple changes need complex coding. Small updates require significant effort and can inadvertently cause breakages elsewhere in the system.
With Algolia, engineers quickly roll out an incredible platform, then share the keys to the kingdom with people in the organization who need freedom of action to make changes and drive growth. Merchandising teams can gain insights and make changes through the visual editor. They can pin, boost, and bury items, and create business rules to run promotions.
96% of surveyed developers say that because of Algolia, they have more time to innovate and create, and spend less time managing back end operations and business.
Source: TechValidate Survey of 192 Users of Algolia
Instead of building relevance from scratch, debugging, and making sure updates don’t break, your engineers can devote their skills and expertise to valuable enhancements and innovations, such as:
- Fine-tuning relevance using business data and analytics
- Adapting relevance strategy to events or seasons
- Digging into long-tail queries and content
- Fighting data deficiencies with synonyms
These activities do more for business goals than spending time on search basics that Algolia has already solved. With tech and business teams working in parallel, everyone does their jobs better. That’s when you see significant ROI.
With higher ROI and lower TCO
Business leaders know that search is essential. Even so, 47% say they either haven’t invested in search or haven’t invested enough. It’s hard to play catch-up to soaring customer expectations, and the bill can be steep. Today’s economy is forcing businesses to do more with even less.
Companies used to building from scratch sometimes get sticker shock when they start shopping for solutions. Seen next to Algolia’s price tag, the low cost of many freely available open source search solutions could look like a cost saving strategy.
After doing the math, it’s another story. It takes time and resources to build stable, secure search with open source software. Any upfront savings will soon be exhausted on additional engineers. Upkeep and customization will keep racking up costs down the road for an inflexible system that non-experts can’t directly use, change, or optimize.
Algolia shows significant return on investment, with companies averaging 382% ROI with payback under 6 months.
After three years of using Algolia:
- Revenue uplift from re-ranking search: $859.1K
- Revenue uplift from recommendations: $1.2M
- Merchandiser time savings from automation: $225.6K
- Developer time savings building new apps: $1.6M
- Developer time savings on maintenance: $549.0K
Source: Forrester Researcher’s Total Economic Impact (TEI) Study
Conclusion
Algolia provides faster integration, better performance, and a superior user and developer experience at lower cost. It’s a better product for modern businesses and delivers on expectations for consumer-grade search.
- Build great experiences at scale, fast.
- Stop maintaining. Start innovating.
- Go to market at the speed of business.
- Empower your stakeholders.
- Don’t blow your budget.
- Exceed customer expectations.
Algolia Helps Increase Online Revenue by 30%
89% of surveyed customers who switched from Elastic Search say Algolia helps them have more flexibility in their operations by having visibility and understanding of their ranking strategy.
Source: TechValidate Survey of 36 Users of Algolia
References
Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact (TEI) study
Coleman Parkes Research. The State of Search and Discovery – Findings.
Deloitte, 2020. Milliseconds Make Millions: A study on how improvements in mobile site speed positively affect a brands bottom line
Algolia, 2016. How Algolia tackled the relevance problem of search engines.
The Register June 16, 2022. Elasticsearch server with no password or encryption leaks a million records
Cedric Pernet. Tech Republic. June 6, 2022. Thousands of unprotected Elasticsearch databases are being ransomed.
https://www.algolia.com/compare-algolia-vs-elasticsearch/
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