>They are one of those great companies that you want to emulate

I created an Algolia account once with my personal github account, just for testing purposes. Starting the next day and continuing for a few weeks, I received a stream of emails from their sales people requesting times to schedule phone calls, and telling me how much they can help my company. I had no idea how they knew which company I worked for until I checked my linkedin and found Algoia people were visiting my profile. They have some seriously stalkerish sales practices.

(I'm leading engineering at Algolia) Very sorry to read that the trial period you've experienced was that stalkerish. In order to provide the best customer & support experience to our users, we do ask our teams to do some research before reaching out to our users. I assume this went a little bit far in your case, most probably because you've listed the company you were working for on your GH profile? Please feel free to reach out to me personally if there is anything I can do or anything you cannot share on HN, my email is sylvain@alg..

The irony of a person commenting on a companies aggressive sales tactics and having the company immediately respond with sales tactics. Love it. I bet you definitely alleviated and sense of being stalked.

Ultimately, though, if a sale is made in this space we’d probably be right in assuming the deal is mutually beneficial.

Step 1 in sales is knowing who you're talking to. If your LinkedIn profile is public, what's the problem? They're a business selling a service so it's reasonable they reach out.

Why on earth are you offended that a company responded positively when you created a relationship with them? If you think visiting your LinkedIn profile is stalking, you should delete it.

Totally agree that sales teams can overreach though. Perhaps there should be a little “why are you signing up? Personal/work/etc” quiz when you sign up, then emails reduced accordingly.

I don't get why people expect privacy on information they made publicly available. It's hardly stalking if your information is just a few clicks away.

Don't they provide the HN search? I have never found it particularly effective.

Hi vonseel, sorry to hear that. I work at Algolia and can directly impact how this search works. Do you have any particular, specific issue or feedback for us to make it better? Thanks!

Really? It's accurate, fast and easy to navigate. Compared to the search options embedded on other sites it's a joy to use.

The HN search implentation is a bit sad, because it lacks the most magic part of Algolia : the real time search.

Using Algolia in a full-page-load HTML request is using a Ferrari do drive to the grocery store. You can, but what a waste

Have you tried https://hn.algolia.com?

Yes I had, but I forgot about it, thanks. Much better than HN own implentation.

Algolia also implemented a linkedin contact search infinitely superior to Linkedin own search.

I remember thinking that both demos were really brilliant growth strategy because it showed clearly, by contrast, how much the status quo was painful

I miss the old search... and was never at ease with Algolia. It's relevant but I don't like the UX.

I use HN search all the time; it's useful.

There is no way to search across multiple comments on the same "story"; I use Google site search for this.

It only counts replies/"comments" for stories, not comments (which would probably be a lot more work).

It differentiates between plural and singular search terms as very different searches.

The only ranking options are by popularity and date (would like to be able to sort results by number of replies too).