When comparing Algolia vs Site Search 360, the Slant community recommends Algolia for most people. In the question“What are the best hosted Search Engine as a Service providers?” Algolia is ranked 1st while Site Search 360 is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose Algolia is:
API replies in few milliseconds and they have datacenters all around the world.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Very fast and reliable
API replies in few milliseconds and they have datacenters all around the world.
Pro As a hosted service it reduces required maintenance work
Algolia provides worldwide hosting, meaning you can scale up search worldwide at the click of a button.
Pro Optimized UX for autocomplete and find-as-you-type results
Their InstantSearch.js library and accompanying native mobile UX tools make it easy to build beautiful search experiences.
Pro Free Hacker Plan: 10K records and 100K monthly operations
In addition to their 14-day free trial, Algolia supports their Community with a free plan as well as discounts for non-profits, students and the open source community.
Pro Search-as-you-type is built-in
Designed to natively search for prefixes (enables auto-complete menu search OOTB).
Pro Very easy to configure
The configuration is based on tie breaks which makes reasoning about the search easier.
Pro 100% customizable
Pro Language-agnostic & typo tolerance
Algolia's engine has been built in such a way that you can index and search any language, or even several languages at the same time.
The engine is also typo tolerant, and will allow for up to two typos in each words of the search query.
This typo tolerance feature is also language agnostic, as it relies on optimized data structures and "fuzzy" tree traversals (implementing a Damarau-Levenshtein distance algorithm) instead of using dictionaries.
Pro Unique ranking formula combining full-text and business relevance
Their Tie-Breaking Algorithm gives you powerful relevance from day one that you can customize as much as you want by integrating the business metrics that matter most.
Pro Quick setup
It takes less than 5 minutes to get this working. After that it is just tuning to make it perfect.
Pro Feature rich
It can index PDF or .doc documents, supports clustering in content groups, allows definition of data points.
Pro Very good support!
I never experienced such a friendly and helpful support team! Thumbs up!
Pro Helpful analytics
Analytics can be viewed and exported from the control panel.
Pro Mobile support
The search also works flawlessly on mobile.
Pro Fast
The performance is great, loading results happens in milliseconds.
Pro API support
Someone can add content and receive search results via a HTTP REST API which makes this product very adaptable.
Cons
Con Commercial
There is a Free tier limited to 10k records that can only do 100k operations.
Con Advanced Options require skills
SS360 is very flexible and allows to tune its crawler. That, however, requires knowledge about XPath.