Algolia had made a tiny acquisition to complement its product offering. The company is acquiring the technology behind SeaUrchin.IO — the team of two behind this product is not joining Algolia.
For those not familiar with Algolia, the startup has developed an impressive search engine API. In just a few lines of codes, you can boost the search box on your site with Algolia’s search.
After that, Algolia provides instant letter-by-letter search results. It feels like you’re searching for something on your local computer using Spotlight.
Integrating Algolia into your website is one part, but you also need to feed Algolia with your search data and customize your data set.
This is where SeaUrchin.IO’s technology becomes useful. Instead of blindingly reordering your search results by setting your custom ranking rules, you get insights from Algolia’s analytics feature.
From the initial idea to the actual release, it took Algolia six months to release this feature. SeaUrchin.IO’s acquisition was just a way to kick off the work more quickly.
Now, you can tie conversion rates to queries. For instance, if you’re running an e-commerce website, you see which query has a higher chance of leading to adding a product to your cart. You can track clicks and conversion events to make small changes and optimize your search flow.
This way, you can fix problematic queries, tag your search results more appropriately to resurface interesting content or add synonyms.
Customers with higher plans can start using the new analytics product now. A lighter version of the analytics feature might come later for smaller plans.
And this is just a start as analytics opens up other opportunities. For instance, Algolia customers will be able to A/B test different relevance formulas. Eventually, you could also imagine models and recommendations based on machine learning across all Algolia customers.
Algolia currently has a bit less than 5,000 customers generating over a billion searches per day. Its clients include Under Armour, Twitch, Periscope, Medium and Stripe.