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 business 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.
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 Elasticsearch?
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 Elasticsearch to help you make the best decision for your business case.
7 out of 10 businesses that implemented advanced search capabilities reported increased revenue from those enhancements
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 behaviour. 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. Slow loading times, in contrast, 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 open source options like Elasticsearch. As Forrester Research has shown, they 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 Elasticsearch.
It’s actually one of the best investments we could’ve made as a company.
Global director of ecommerce CRM, luxury sportswear
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 feels like 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.
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:
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Instant, typo tolerant
Search-as-you-type results
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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 Elasticsearch, it’s another story. Engineering support is necessary to build new features. Typo tolerance, for example, requires extensive rule-setting and tedious busy work.
It’s possible to work with a schema-less index in Elasticsearch, but it’s not the preferred option. Elasticsearch has built its libraries out slowly over time with supporting documentation that can be notoriously difficult to read. With the right developer skills, things can be done right, but updating inventory and correcting product specs is a headache and takes longer.
Back end survival kit
Do you have, at minimum:
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Easy-to-use UX
For your business users
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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
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:
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Will building and maintaining a complex system from scratch give your company a competitive advantage?
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How much revenue is your company losing because of a less-than-stellar search experience?
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How long can you afford to wait before delivering a cutting-edge user experience?
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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 adaptx fast enough to trends
- 2 in 5 lacked the necessary expertise
- over 1/3 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 an open source solution like Elasticsearch.
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 customers who switched from Elasticsearch say Algolia’s visibility into ranking strategy gives them more operational flexibility in their operations by having visibility and understanding of their ranking strategy
Source: TechValidate survey of 36 Users of Algolia
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