Introduction
What is Algolia?
Algolia Overview
Algolia is a search and discovery API platform that provides fast, relevant, and customizable search capabilities for websites and applications. We use it to enhance site search, product discovery, and provide real-time user search suggestions.
Key Features
- Instant Search Results: Delivers immediate, real-time search results as users type.
- Full-text & Faceted Search: Supports advanced text searches, filtering, and search suggestions.
- Autocomplete & Typo Tolerance: Provides autocomplete suggestions and handles typos for better user experience.
- Analytics: Built-in analytics track user behavior, optimizing search based on query insights. We are yet to enable this in our implementation.
Use Cases
- E-commerce: We use it for product search and filtering
- New User Experience (Visitor/Guest)
- Popular Keywords (Dynamic) - Check
- No History
- Novelty User Experience (Subsequent search, can be a visitor/logged in user)
- Popular Keywords (Dynamic) - Consistent throughout
- User Search History -> Pinia Persistent Storage - only when they are a visitor.
- If logged in User: The search history will come from ECOM API
- If ECOM API isn’t handling this at the moment - we need to suggest they handle this at their end.
- On Typing - Independent of their logged in status.
- Autocomplete search suggestions
- Suggest keywords, categories and products based on what the user is typing
- Show user search history
- Suggestion results will show nearest correct spelling (Ex: Tomber/Timber) - on Algolia
- In results, suggestions that do not match the spelling should be in bold
- Clear history option - whether to remove the data or archive them On search
- Cross button to clear the search input and star over again
- Should be able to search the site's integral feature pages like: Pro Card, FAQ. (Ex: if you search Prime on Amazon, it shows results for Amazon Prime as well) - Handled on search-result-page.vue.
Integrations
We use Algolia in our product with their official SDK available for NUXT.
References
Why Algolia?
Algolia was originally being used by the NL version of ToolStation, while the UK version uses Bloomreach for the same. In the early business discussion it was decided that we will use Algolia for our implementation. Hence, our implementation should render reults similar to what we see on NL version of ToolStation.
Use Cases Bifurcation
This section describes and bifurcates the technical use cases of Algolia in our product. Our use case of Algolia can be understood by the following diagram.
Each use case is described ahead, in their own dedicated sections.