Company
Date Published
Author
Matthieu Dumont
Word count
1459
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Zendesk customers worldwide, with Help Centers supporting multiple languages, have an Algolia integration that now supports 30 languages. Initially, the integration had flaws that were quickly discovered by users, who needed language support out of the box. The team learned that there's no magic bullet for handling different languages and that some things aren't obvious, like sentence construction and punctuation differences between languages. To improve the framework, they added logic on top of translations, allowing for dynamic content in sentences. They also implemented stop words handling to improve query relevance, using both automatic removal and optional word specification parameters. The team plans to further improve the integration by adding language-specific tags and moving the stop words logic to Algolia index settings.