We haz new search courtesy of Algolia

Exciting times for us at diginomica as we use the new year as a time for systematically improving what we do and how we do things.

Search has been a bugbear of mine since forever. Let's face it, Wordpress (which is our CMS backbone) is great for many things but search? It sucks.

Today, I am happy to announce that we've solved the problem with Algolia.

To the right of this story, you can see the results of a search. The search algorithm organizes what it finds in chronological order and by type of content. In the first example, you can see that it starts with posts and then pulls from the custom multi-importer feed we use to expose partner feed items. Then it starts to show the media associated with that search term so that if all you want is an image, perhaps for your own purposes, then you can pull it up.

Beneath what you see in this screen grab, Algolia also shows the content associated with any available categories and tags.

The categories and tags sections are interesting because that brings up an archive page of all the stories related to that category.

As an example, I typed in Oracle and at the bottom saw the oow17 tag. That provides me with all the Oracle Open World 2017 (hence oow17) content we produced for that event.

This is great for anyone who researches using diginomica as a resource. We have over 7.600 pieces of discrete content. That, coupled to a solid search tool means we are now a powerful repository of enterprise software analysis.

And - as always - it's all free.

Another cool thing.

Algolia has predictive 'type ahead' capability which means it can work out what you are likely to want from your typing in a few letters. If I had added H to SAP then it would have started to show SAPPHIRE stories.

Over the coming days, we'll be tweaking the presentation a bit to make it even cooler and user-friendly.

Enjoy...