A helpful platform that makes search easy and saves time
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Algolia to help support multiple parts of our marketplace -- resource search, trending search queries/autocomplete, and select re-ranking tools. These enable us to serve the millions of educators who use TPT to save time and find the resources they need to support their students. We use a mix of Algolia's UI as well as in-house platforms and systems to manage our system and help us catalog and easily handle discoverability for the millions of resources available on our platform and to index all new resources being added every hour by our community of Teacher Authors.
Pros
- Intuitive analytics about search performance
- Helpful and technical customer support and account management teams
- Customization to modify their product to specific business use cases
- Ability to test new optimizations for search ranking to improve results and meet business needs
Cons
- Better integration of features (ex. synonyms feature is great but isn't respected by their re-ranking product)
- Tooling to reduce spam search queries being triaged by system/logged to analytics panels
- More automated summaries of analytics (ie. recommend synonyms to add, trends noticed in search volume in specific areas of site, easier ways to leverage API vs using website UI)
Return on Investment
- Increase in sales by > 5% at launch
- Less engineering time required to make search algorithm changes
Alternatives Considered
Amazon Elasticsearch Service
Other Software Used
Looker, Google Analytics, Heap
