I have to say Algolia is underwhelming (even after all these years). Perhaps I'm using it wrong, but I often more quickly find the comment or story I'm searching for via a targeted search using Google. I should give Bing a try as I've been been getting better finance related results there lately--especially when trying to locate ratings and / or other docs related to newly issued securities.
I had to use Algolia in a recent ecommerce solution, I think e-commerce really is the sweet spot for what Algolia offers, quick setup not a lot of need to mess around with your rankings etc. with very simple content.
I'm used to Solr and ElasticSearch for most sites I've ran, which tend to be information sites dense where you need to be able to control rankings to get the best results, which HN is much closer to than to an e-commerce site.
Agreed. I dread having to use Algolia search on documentation these days. The search results feel pretty naively selected, and the UI is pretty poor. I get that people want to deploy static sites, but can we please find a way to bring back search _pages_?
