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Algolia.com search integration for Vanilla?

phreakphreak Vanilla*APP (White Label) & Vanilla*Skins Shop MVP
edited November 2014 in General Banter

I just came across http://www.algolia.com/ and i was amazed what a integration could probably do for my forum.

Anyone testet or tried to integrate it yet? Someone of the DEVs willing to take look into the Algolia Docs?
If it would make sense i'd be in for sponsoring this as an alternative to the OS search of Vanilla.

Greetz, phreak

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Comments

  • peregrineperegrine MVP
    edited November 2014

    From Algolia
    To index your existing data for the first time, you need to iterate through your database and send each row to Algolia's servers. You can use our API clients or one of our connectors.

    Even if technically possible....

    I may be wrong, but it looks like you need to sign up with them and pay. Not sure how many self-hosted users are up for that.

    http://www.algolia.com/pricing

    I may not provide the completed solution you might desire, but I do try to provide honest suggestions to help you solve your issue.

  • R_JR_J Ex-Fanboy Munich Admin

    I've came across another service like that some months ago: http://indexden.com/pricing

    And I already started building a simple search plugin earlier this year, but I never finished that. Although the reason for not finishing that is that I have no fun in building user interfaces, I wouldn't invest time in building a search for a hosted version any more.

    Here are some other reasons why I totally lost interest for a custom search plugin:

    The main reason for having a dedicated index table for searching in Vanilla was that using MySQLs full text index needed the tables to be ISAM tables. ISAM is blocking on several operations, while InnoDB is not. I think a forum should really use InnoDB for its main tables!
    The current version of MySQL allows indexing of InnoDB tables so there is no more need for using ISAM.

    The Sphinx search plugin is not usable for hosted solutions. You need to have your own server for that. vServers are really cheap these days: I have one and pay less than 3 EUR per month. I have it set up with nginx, MySQL, memcached and OpCache and the speed gain compared to a hosted solution is unbelievable!
    For using your own server, you need to have some basic understanding of Linux and a good awareness of security concerns, though.

    From my point of view, there are two main groups of forum admins:

    1. Those who want to setup a toy community with little to no effort in time and costs. I don't think that Vanilla is the best software for them. Vanilla is very, very flexible tool and flexibility equals unstableness for those who cannot handle this tool.
    2. Those who like to tweak their community to the max - in terms of speed and/or functionality. If you like to offer a real good user experience, speed yhould be your main concern and then you shouldn't work with some hosting providers, but with your own dedicated server.

    That leads to: either you are toying around and then a toy search is okay or you are doing serious investments and then you can profit from SphinxSearch.

  • phreakphreak Vanilla*APP (White Label) & Vanilla*Skins Shop MVP
    edited November 2014

    @peregrine: Sure, thats a point. There might not be enough forums with Vanilla out there that are run with highly professionall aims (big communities, communities with advertising clients and so on, that play a certain rule in their country).

    @R_J: Thanx for all your opinion on this. It's great to get that info from you. My problem is, that i, my host and a skilled developer were not able to make Sphinx work in our environment. So i'm looking for a versatile solution (without adding a Google Search bar). But as mentioned both are very pricey, and my community has already more than 100.000 pages i assume.

    The current Vanilal OS search is a real bottleneck to the happiness of users.

    • VanillaAPP | iOS & Android App for Vanilla - White label app for Vanilla Forums OS
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  • R_JR_J Ex-Fanboy Munich Admin

    I will update my GitHub repository for CustomSearch this weekend, but I do not think I will do any code clean up. Furthermore I had some insights into Vanilla models that I haven't had when I was writing the model for the plugin so I think it is uglier than it could be. But what is working by now (if I remember it right):

    • it creates a tables for unique words
    • creates a table for WordID <-> DiscussionID relations
    • counts how often a word is used
    • updates tables on each CRUD action

    It uses minimum (and maximum?) word length from config and maybe even filters out stop words.

    What is not implemented is any form of usable UI and "input to search string" conversation.

    Maybe you and your developer can get this as a start.

  • LincLinc Detroit Admin

    I will raise the idea of moving our Advanced Search feature downstream to our lower cloud plans. Search is something that still requires ops skills to do well and I suspect it might make our Starter plan a lot more compelling.

  • hgtonighthgtonight ∞ · New Moderator

    @phreak said:
    My problem is, that i, my host and a skilled developer were not able to make Sphinx work in our environment.

    Was I that developer? Even if I was, I would be happy to try again. :)

    As far as Algolia vs. Indexen vs. Google. An external service will always have more latency than an internal service. If you are going through the trouble of setting up any search service, I would suggest you do the hosting.

    @Linc, I just noticed that these two links have different plans showing:

    Just a heads up to forward on to whoever maintains that.

    Search first

    Check out the Documentation! We are always looking for new content and pull requests.

    Click on insightful, awesome, and funny reactions to thank community volunteers for their valuable posts.

  • peregrineperegrine MVP
    edited November 2014

    another heads-up: @linc

    Is it really called "Whish List Integration" or is it a typo?

    Whish List Integration
    Integrate to WishList Member.

    http://vanillaforums.com/info/plugins

    or should it be

    Wish List Integration
    Integrate to WishList Member.

    I may not provide the completed solution you might desire, but I do try to provide honest suggestions to help you solve your issue.

  • LincLinc Detroit Admin

    Hahaha, thanks @peregrine, will send 'em a patch. I was just on that page fixing mistakes today. The Starter plan lists like 4 things as not being available when they are.

  • @hgtonight That's actually not true. I can speak at least for Algolia (disclaimer: I am the co-founder & CTO): our design is to send queries directly from browser to our servers and performance is our strong differentiator (you can try it on producthunt.com for example).

    Our backend is designed to reply in few milliseconds and we have servers in 12 different datacenters to optimize network latency, it will definitely be faster than having something else :)

  • @Linc said:
    Hahaha, thanks peregrine, will send 'em a patch.

    that would be a "smatching" good idea.

    I may not provide the completed solution you might desire, but I do try to provide honest suggestions to help you solve your issue.

  • LincLinc Detroit Admin

    @hgtonight said:
    I just noticed that these two links have different plans showing

    The Starter plan is still available at /plans, it's just under the others. We don't get a lot of uptake on it and it's definitely not our bread-and-butter, so we de-emphasized it for now.

  • hgtonighthgtonight ∞ · New Moderator

    @Linc said:
    The Starter plan is still available at /plans, it's just under the others. We don't get a lot of uptake on it and it's definitely not our bread-and-butter, so we de-emphasized it for now.

    Wow, totally missed that. Goes to show that all the talk about "content above the fold" truly is important.

    Search first

    Check out the Documentation! We are always looking for new content and pull requests.

    Click on insightful, awesome, and funny reactions to thank community volunteers for their valuable posts.

  • phreakphreak Vanilla*APP (White Label) & Vanilla*Skins Shop MVP
    edited November 2014

    @hgtonight: Haha, not exactly you were just one in a row of DEVs trying that. From the author, to you, to my CAKE Developer. ;)

    @jlemoine_algo: Thanx to responding here. Agolia truly looks nice. Right now, the Vanilla costumer base might be a bit to small to gain a lot from. But i'll give an integration with Vanilla and what i could mean to my community, plus calculating costs and so on and i'll maybe pic it up from there.

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    • VanillaSkins | Plugins, Themes, Graphics and Custom Development for Vanilla
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