customer-answers.txt

* Question 1:
Hello,

I'm new to search engines, and there are a lot of concepts I'm not educated on.
To make my onboarding smoother, it'd help if you could provide me with some definitions of the following concepts:
- Records
- Indexing

I'm also struggling with understanding what types of metrics would be useful to include in the "Custom Ranking." 

Cheers,
George

* Answer 1:
Hello George,

I am glad to help you getting introduced to those concepts.

- Records
A record is an object you add to an index and want to search for.
It can contain any number of attributes (string, date, number, GPS coordinates, etc.).

- Indexing
Indexing is the process of uploading your backend data up to Algolia's on-the-cloud Search Engine.
Your data is then stored into an Index. It is the equivalent for search of what a “table” is for a database.
Unlike a database table, an index is optimized for search operations.

- Custom Ranking
The custom ranking field will accept any type of numerical or boolean value that represents the relative relevance of your records.
Numerical metrics are used to give precedence to specific characteristics (like the number of sales, views or likes).
Boolean metrics are used to boost records at the *top* of the results page (think Google Ads links). 

I hope it makes more sense now. Please feel free to get back to me if you have more questions.
By the way, we have plenty of materials to get you educated on Algolia on our website (https://www.algolia.com/doc/).

Kind Regards,
Bertrand

**************************************************************************************************************

* Question 2:
Hello,

Sorry to give you the kind of feedback that I know you do not want to hear, but I really hate the new dashboard design.
Clearing and deleting indexes are now several clicks away. I am needing to use these features while iterating, 
so this is inconvenient.

Regards,
Matt

* Answer 2:

Hello Matt,

We have decided to add an additional confirmation step to prevent unintentional index deletion on live environment.

For your development purposes, may I recommend you to use CURL scripts for making such tasks more handy?
CLEAR Index: see https://www.algolia.com/doc/rest-api/search/#clear-an-index
DELETE Index: see https://www.algolia.com/doc/rest-api/search/#delete-an-index

I hope I have been helpful. Please feel free to get back to me if you have more questions.

Kind Regards,
Bertrand 

**************************************************************************************************************

* Question 3:
Hi,

I'm looking to integrate Algolia in my website. Will this be a lot of development work for me?
What's the high level process look like?

Regards,
Leo

* Answer 3:

Hello Leo,

Implementing Algolia can be broken down into a simple 3-step process:

. Index your data with us
Algolia provides plenty of API wrappers in a wide range of programming languages
(see https://www.algolia.com/doc/api-reference/) for you to integrate Algolia in your environment.

. Configure any necessary relevance or ranking settings
See https://www.algolia.com/doc/guides/ranking/ranking-formula/.
This step defines which attributes can be searched and which ones impact scoring.

. Build a search user interface.
See https://www.algolia.com/doc/guides/search-ui/building-a-search-ui/

For performance reason, Algolia highly recommends to fetch and display search results directly on client-side (browser), 
instead of having your backend server calling Algolia and serving results back to the client (time-costly network hops).
To this end, Algolia provides InstantSearch.js, a JavaScript library of UI widgets for building an instant search experience with Algolia’s JS API client
(see https://www.algolia.com/doc/guides/search-ui/search-libraries/#instantsearchjs).
 
I hope I have been helpful. Please feel free to get back to me if you have more questions.

Kind Regards,
Bertrand