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Algolia

Instant Search on iOS App Store!

If you have an iOS device you probably search the App Store regularly for apps you have heard about. Following the recent AppGratis ousting from the AppStore, there were claims that the App Store search is broken. That was our trigger to try something ourselves that could serve both as a good demo and help us to explore new use-cases! Check it out!

Obtaining the data

So first, we needed to obtain the data. Apple provides an API to accredited developers, but given that this can be fairly difficult to attain, we considered other solutions. Crawling was our second option, but that approach has its own caveats: you need to play nice with their servers or you get banned (very) quickly. We didn’t want to spend days implementing our own distributed crawler and definitely didn’t have the time to do a sequential and polite crawling. It is in these moments that you are glad to have an external team to do the job for you.

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Algolia Search Offline SDK now supports Cocoapods

We have great news for our iOS and OS X users: our Offline SDK is now available as a CocoaPods dependency.

Cocoapods is a popular dependency management tool that lets you specify the libraries (dependencies) you want to use for your project in an easy-to-edit text file (Podfile). It then fetches all the required libraries and sets up your Xcode workspace.

You can now set up Algolia Search Offline in your iOS project with this line in your Podfile:
pod 'AlgoliaSearchOffline-iOS-SDK'

You can also set up Algolia Search Offline in your OS X project with this line:
pod 'AlgoliaSearchOffline-OSX-SDK'

Once you’re done, simply use the “pod install” command to set up Algolia Search Offline in your project. Now it’s easy to manage library dependencies for iOS and OS X projects!

Algolia Search is now available for RubyMotion!

If you are a Ruby developer and have an iPhone, chances are you already now about the cool project that is RubyMotion! I quote:

“It lets you quickly develop and test native iOS applications for iPhone or iPad, all using the awesome Ruby language you know and love.”

And it rocks! It’s actually used by the Ruby on Rails sponsor 37signals.

What if you could use your favorite search engine along with your favorite language to create iOS apps? That’s exactly what we propose with a RubyMotion Algolia Search gem that seamlessly integrates in your Ruby project. You know the trick:

The gem code is open source. You can fork it from github.

Special thanks to the RubyMotion team and especially to Joffrey for this integration!

V2: Our new Offline Search SDK with Geo-search and other features!

While our latest news focused on the Algolia Search cloud offer (you can still join the beta), we’re pleased to introduce a major new version of Algolia Search offline: V2! It is available today for iOS, Android and OS X. Windows Phone and Windows versions will be released as soon as they are ready. A few months in the making, we used our early customers’ feedback to introduce new features while simplifying integration.

Algolia became the easiest way to search by geolocation!

The ease of integration is a constant concern for us and that’s why we carefully consider every new feature. Two important features made it in this version:
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We are finalists at NEXT Berlin!

The NEXT Berlin Conference will take place on April 23rd & 24th in one of the most active ecosystem in Europe!  More than 100 experts will share their knowledge with an expected audience of 2000 attendees.

If you follow our newsletter or social presence, chances are you saw our call for help to participate in the NEXT Berlin startup competition. We sincerely thank you for your votes! They placed us in the 30 top startups to be considered for the final. The judges then selected us as one of the 12 finalists to pitch during the conference. We are thrilled to be able to present Algolia to the Berlin ecosystem!

If you happen to be attending NEXT Berlin, ping me if you’d like to meet! (@dessaigne on twitter, or nicolas at algolia dot com).

Search on OS X: Search Kit vs Algolia

I recently read Mattt Thompson’s post about Apple Search Kit and he’s right about it being rather unknown, at least I had never heard of it before. So my very first thought was “how does it compare to our own SDK for OS X?” I immediately asked Julien if he could perform a few tests. Here are our findings.

Scope of use

Before examining the technical differences, it is important to stress the different intents behind the creation of both tools.

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Instant Search on CrunchBase

After launching the Beta Cloud version of Algolia, we wanted to demonstrate what it can do. We built a search engine using CrunchBase data, so entrepreneurs can easily search for their company or themselves. Check it out!

You can search for companies, people and financial organizations, using multiple attributes. Results are updated after each keystroke and matching characters are highlighted. And of course it tolerates typos. In this post we’ll explain in more detail how it works.

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Our Cloud Version is in Beta!

Imagine all the power and simplicity of Algolia Search, but available online, from any connected device. Welcome to our Cloud offer!

Up to now, our instant, typo-friendly search was only available locally on your device. You could only index data stored directly in your app. While that was great for offline apps, it was not so fantastic for rapidly changing data server-side. All that has just changed! You can now use our search engine online, enabling you to change your data at any frequency and return consistantly up-to-date search results in your apps. Interested? Request your invitation to the Beta from the features page.

And don’t forget you can combine it with our offline SDK, for great search performance whatever the connectivity!

New Website, New Video, New Algolia!

If you have visited our website in the past few days you may have noticed a few changes. We relaunched our website with a brand new design! Our main objective was to convey a clearer message about what Algolia is about and what we have to offer. In order to achieve this we:

  • Completely redesigned the site to be less cluttered and hopefully better looking
  • Rewrote most of the content aiming for clarity and conciseness
  • Added illustrations to support our messages
  • Added a use-cases section to illustrate what can be built with Algolia Search.

And finally, we made a new short video that should get you up to speed in barely a minute :)

Hope you like it! Let us know how we could continue to improve!

PS: Don’t forget to check out our new FREE offer!

Algolia Search is now available for FREE!

Yes, you read that right! We’re not talking about a free trial, but of a completely FREE version of our SDK. It is often difficult to implement a good search experience, so we want to democratize access to easy-to-integrate and first class search features! All you have to do is to display non-intrusive Algolia branding.

This branded offer is already available on our website. Don’t delay, register today! Check out our use-cases section to discover possible implementations and see how Sharypic, Offline dictionaries, and Sush.io have integrated Algolia in their apps.

Help us spread the word. We want every app developer to be able to take advantage of this offer!