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I remember a previous employer asked me to talk to one of the authors because I have NLP and search engine design experience (I forgot which author). I remember

I remember a previous employer asked me to talk to one of the authors because I have NLP and search engine design experience (I forgot which author). I remember he kept saying they don't do big data and that most NLP stuff other search engines use are irrelevant because their product works with the type of search they do. I asked a couple of complex questions which they disregarded as not important for their product. This was probably 3 years ago or less so the product might have changed, but what I got out of that chat was that Algolia is for websites that want to add a search functionality with a nice UI without much hassle. But if you are doing something complex it's does not compare to Solr or Elasticsearch Again this was a while ago.

ch4s3 10y ago
My experience has been that if search isn't critical to the core of your business, you should use Algolia. What I mean is that good search is hard and expensive to build, and if your product will not suffer from good enough search then it will be an order of magnitude cheaper. I use it to search over a list of 25k ish items that can be ordered broken into 4 categories. The users are domain experts and know what they're searching for. Algolia took me 45 minutes to set up and it returns results almost as fast as I can type, it was a no brainer. However, if I had users that needed to lean on search to find things they didn't know about I would want to look into something that could infer meaning from the text input.