CODEWITHSUNDEEP
algolia
mimsugara
mimsugara

Reputation: 879

Does Algolia have a search with recommendation?

I was wondering if the Algolia service provides some kind of recommendations mechanism when doing a search.

I could not find in the API documentation anything related with providing the client with more refined and intelligent search alternatives based on the index data.

The scenario I am trying to describe is the following (this example is a bit over-the-top):

Given a user is searching for "red car" then the system provides more specific search alternatives and possibly related items that exist in the database (e.g. ferrari, red driving gloves, fast and furious soundtrack :-) )

Update

For future reference, I ended up doing a basic recommendation system using the text search capabilities of Algolia.

Summarising, when caris saved it's attributes color, speed, engine, etc, are used to create synonyms indexes, for example for engine ferrari in Engine index: { synonyms: ['red', 'ferrari', 'fast'], value: 'ferrari' } Finally, the each index, must indicate the synonyms attribute for search and value as the returned result of a search.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1357

Answers (1)

Olivier Lance
Olivier Lance

Reputation: 1748

Algolia does not provide that kind of "intelligence" out of the box.

Something you can do to approximate what you're looking for is using synonyms and a combination of other parameters:

  • Define synonyms groups such as "car,Ferrari,driving gloves", "red,dark red,tangerine,orange", ...
  • when sending a search query, set optionalWords to the list of words contained in that query. This will make each word of your query optional.
  • Also set removeStopWords to true so that words like "the", "a" (...) are ignored, to improve relevance.

With a well defined list of synonyms, this will make your original query interpreted as many other possibilities and thus increase the variety of possible results.

Be aware though that it could also impact the relevance of your results, as users might for instance not want to look for gloves when they search for a car!

Upvotes: 2

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