Unless you’re living in the digital dark ages you certainly rely on search everyday. Surprisingly enough searching for what we’re looking for is somewhat difficult. Sure there is Google and Bing to crawl through the world’s data, but try searching for a keyword inside a website or an app and you are likely to find that you’re not finding what you want so easily.
Essentially search is broken and often times we resort to fire up a Google page to find what we wanted on another website. French company Algolia is changing the search ecosystem with a blazing fast search engine based on JSON-formatted queries. Developers can keep the data on their servers and only need to include a couple of lines of code to get the service up and running.
The French company is a member of The Family accelerator and has been funded by Index Ventures, Alven Capital and Point Nine Capital. Now they get the blessing of Y Combinator, which will give them a big boost in signing on big client names and further develop their business. It’s not so common for French startups to enter the Y Combinator program, another notable example would be the open source project Docker who has also been backed by Y Combinator.
To showcase how terrible the search engine panorama is across the board Algolia has recently announced the Search Grader, a ranking system that evaluates the quality of multiple web services based on their search results relevancy, speed and user experience. Even if there is no real challenge for companies to implement Algolia’s search solution for users it makes the whole difference as it greatly improves user experience – search results are instantaneous and quite accurate. If you’re a developer have a look at how you can use these tools to improve your own service, pricing plans start at $19 so there’s no reason to not give it a spin!