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Disclaimer: I'm a software engineer working on the core search engine at algolia, but the opinions of this post are my own and not an official statement. Search is a hard job, and it's hard in many ways. The most obvious difficulties are related to relevance, and yes this part is specific to each business case. But that's not the only issues one has to solve when implementing search. Even without speaking about the software you run, running it so that you have high availability, fast search results, fast enough to provide search as you type, reliable indexing, low latency in several regions ... This is the first service we provided, this is what SaaS is about. Being on inside of a SaaS compagnie, shows you the amount of works we save to our customers. Then, about software solution itself. Providing search is not just about running generic piece of code. It's a whole eco system, continuously evolving. Working with a SaaS solution is hiring a team of more than hundred engineers dedicated to search. From the core software to frontend UI modules, the amount of engineering needed is way above what most companies can dedicate to search. Back to relevance, some aspects are specific to business logic but some are also specific to search. We provide the search knowledge, so that you can focus on your own issues. And for the software behind our services, we're not trying to build the one size fits all search tool, but a tool dedicated to the kind of search needed in today's web applications. I'm obviously biased, but I strongly believe that the kind of search we focus on, fast accurate top results rather than exhaustive search, fits terribly well our users' needs. |