When comparing Algolia vs Searx, the Slant community recommends Searx for most people. In the question“What are the best self-hosted search engines?” Searx is ranked 5th while Algolia is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose Searx is:
Since you have access to all the .yaml files, you can easily modify it to your needs.
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 Extremely customisable
Since you have access to all the .yaml files, you can easily modify it to your needs.
Pro Can add many search engines
Have a vast choice for choosing search engines
Pro Can use a proxy
Using a proxy called Morty hides the IP address of the user
Pro Most Private Search engine
Since it can be hosted on your own server/ computer, it is very private, nothing leaves your computer.
No cookies or ads too
Pro Very fast
Since it is a Python program with a web interface, it's very very fast even on a poor internet connection
Pro Supports instant answers
Uses Google and Bing, and hence has the 'quick answers' feature of both the search engines.
Cons
Con Commercial
There is a Free tier limited to 10k records that can only do 100k operations.
Con Not very mobile friendly
Needs WSL2 for windows, and works natively on macOS and Linux
But no support for Android or iOS