How we tackled the search engine relevance problem | Algolia

Algolia, a search engine company, initially built an offline search SDK for mobile applications due to the unavailability of pre-existing search engine software on smartphones. The team had to create everything from scratch within the limitations imposed by smartphones such as low memory and processing power. They eventually pivoted to a SaaS solution with significant improvements in speed and relevance. Algolia's ranking algorithm is designed to fix issues with other search engines, which mix different criteria into one score for each document. Instead, Algolia uses a tie-breaking algorithm that calculates multiple scores and applies successive sorting based on the order of importance. This approach allows users to configure relevance for specific use-cases by determining the set of rules and their order of importance.