The Challenge: Scaling Multilingual Search for a Growing Global Audience

Wizbii combines digital tools with human support to simplify administrative and financial procedures and help users improve their purchasing power. The platform also gives them access to job offers.

Central to the company's mission is a multilingual search experience that evolves and adapts to user needs.

Wizbii's goal: make these procedures clearer, simpler and less daunting, with real human support, to help people regain control of their budget. The service is available in France, Italy, Spain and Germany.

Based in France, with offices in Grenoble, Paris, and Pau in the southwest of the country, the Wizbii sites have a European reach.

An Algolia customer since 2018, Wizbii, with 1.5+ million users every year, is on its way to becoming an international and multilingual resource for 18- to 40-year-olds in key markets in Europe and the rest of the world.

The Solution: Improving user experience

At Wizbii, search is at the heart of the user experience. User expectations are high, and they simply won’t stick around if the technology doesn’t quickly deliver relevant results.

“The thing that has changed the most in ten years is the customer,” points out Rémi Alvado, Wizbii’s CTO. “Customers are no longer willing to accept a slow user experience or an unattractive website. If the site doesn’t perform well, doesn’t deliver the expected results or doesn’t work as promised, users will go elsewhere.”

Before 2018, the Wizbii team had been using Elasticsearch with unsatisfactory results. Optimizing multilingual search functionality was crucial, but results were slow and relevancy left much to be desired.

For the technical team, using Elasticsearch to ensure multilingual search functionality was not an easy or straightforward process. It required a dedicated group of employees to update and maintain it, putting a strain on Wizbii’s limited start-up budget.

Wizbii had already opened discussions with Algolia in 2015 and was convinced of the technology’s effectiveness. In 2017, following a new round of funding, Rémi Alvado and his team made their move and implemented Algolia Search. Their success since then has been undeniable.

“Wizbii is a great example,” explains Rémi Alvado. “It is a platform to discover and access your financial aid, among other things. Before Algolia, things had been moving very slowly. We had neither users nor advertisers. A couple of weeks after we installed Algolia Search, the site’s traffic exploded. It was a dramatic shift.”

The Result: Fast and relevant multilingual search

With more than 300,000 job offers available on Wizbii’s job platform at any given moment, and new offers continuously coming in, indexing this information and making it available to users is critical. Search must be precise and fast enough to drive traffic and meet users’ needs.

Since 2018, the Algolia integration has significantly improved the speed and relevancy of search results across Wizbii’s projects. Algolia’s search technology supports the multiple languages used on the Wizbii sites and provides synonym capabilities that span globally across the entire platform, improving the user experience.

The multilingual search functionality has been a boon to users and developers alike. Unlike the earlier search technology, Algolia's time to implement changes and updates is fast – typically taking only one or two days for the back end and only a couple of weeks to update and configure Wizbii's proprietary front-end APIs. 

Algolia features such Facets & Filters and indexing with Search have been easy to put in place and have been implemented across the company. The technology is available for public search, used by job seekers, letting them save searches and enabling them to send emails based on saved searches, for example.

For Rémi Alvado and his team at Wizbii, Algolia is “simply a great product.”

Also used for administrative functions, it allows Wizbii employees to refine and build the platform’s databases. As Rémi Alvado notes: “Everyone at Wizbii uses Algolia Search. It is much simpler and more convenient than other solutions. It is easy to configure technically and delivers quality search results that are relevant to our users and critical for our business.”

With a simple, intuitive API backed by quality documentation and support, Algolia enables developers to focus on building innovative solutions for Wizbii’s business customers. In addition, its excellent search capabilities help drive traffic and improve the overall quality of services offered to Wizbii’s young multilingual customer base.

This matches the live page, so no edits are needed. The only wording differences are cosmetic: “customer base” versus “target audience”, and “administrative functions” versus “back-office functionality”.