You’re not even addressing the engineering costs though. The portion of cost of a search engine solution attributable to the set up of Elastic Search is basically zero. The cost is understanding if the search surfaces relevant items for the specific use case, including asymmetric costs for surfacing bad items in many use cases. Not to mention that plug and play third party solutions like Solr / ES are highly inapplicable to a lot of use cases.

I set up algolia for a client while doing some work for them. We needed to add search to a website we were building which searched over data in the client's CMS.

I could have set up elasticsearch. But algolia was cheap and easy to configure, and we could just click around the algolia UI to tweak things like "number of allowed spelling mistakes". We didn't need to proxy anything or set up routes - we just pulled in the algolia JS library to run queries from the application. It was easier for the client to maintain in an ongoing way rather than maintaining their own elasticsearch instance on EC2 or something like that.

I'm sure there are plenty of times you'd want to run your own elasticsearch instance, and I think that would also have been a reasonable choice for us. But I still feel pretty happy with the choice to use algolia.

Arguments to set up your own elasticsearch instance remind me of the criticism against dropbox - "just run your own server with rsync! Its so easy!". Paying someone a small amount of money to do that for me is often a great deal.

> You’re not even addressing the engineering costs though

This is a pretty silly thing to say. How could you possibly know what I'm addressing?

I actually have experience with all of these scenarios, and bar none Algolia has been the fastest, smoothest, bug-free-and-feature-rich-for-the-dollar rollouts for search experiences I have ever come across.

> including asymmetric costs for surfacing bad items in many use cases

Sure, if you're Google, Netflix or Amazon. For the 99.9% of the rest of the world where search isn't core to the business, there's unlikely to be any discernible impact going one way or the other, except saving money and launching faster.

Why do you buy clothes when you could just make them yourself?

A better anology would be to consider a person with very special dietary needs, and then say “why buy dinner when you can make it yourself and actually be sure it meets the dietary needs.”

Sounds like a good case for Algolia Professional Services! (If this exists?)

I remember pushing Google's search appliance for a large media company some 10 years ago or so (no benefit to myself though, which was pretty noob). It made sense at the time, and solved something for them better than they probably would have implemented it themselves in a good enough way. The most complicated part was setting up rules about what was public / private / internal etc.

Except this would be prohibitively expensive. The labor cost of those specialized employees as consultants would be huge.

So you are saying it’s too expensive to hire those specialists but you need those specialists to setup a working search solution? Is your stance that only companies that can afford a bespoke solution should implement search?

You do know that paying for these kinds of services from consultants is much more expensive than hiring in-house, right? Consulting is purchased either because you only need the specialization for a short time and can pay the mark up for the flexibility, or because you need some external virtue signalling of prestige or authority to overcome in-house political blockers. Consulting is absolutely not the cost-effective option for a specialization you’ll need frequently.