How to Implement Search Functionality in Node.js Using Algolia API
An efficient search is a vital feature of most modern web apps and sites. Using the Algolia API, it’s possible to implement powerful search functionality that significantly enhances the user experience.
Whether you’re building a blog, e-commerce platform, or any application that needs search, Node.js is a powerful web technology to do it with. Algolia provides you with a great platform to build a robust search system on top of.
What Is Algolia?
Algolia is a hosted search engine that provides you with a platform and tools to implement efficient and flexible searches on websites and applications. Algolia has two components: search and analytics.
Using Algolia, you can create great search experiences for your users and then use tools to analyze and draw meaningful insights from your application.
Algolia also offers a developer API and supporting SDKs to allow seamless integration with apps built in various languages. This gives the dual benefit of anAPI for low-level power and an SDK for easier development of common behavior.
Algolia requires you to sign up for an account to integrate its search into your Node.js apps. Log on toAlgolia.comto sign up for free.
How to Get Algolia Developer API Credentials
To implement Algolia search, you need to create an application for your project. When you sign up, Algolia creates a new application calledMy First Applicationfor you, and you can choose to either use it or create a new one.
Getting your API credentials is very easy from the dashboard. There is a list of options includingAPI Keys:
When you click onAPI Keys, you’ll see a page with different credentials. All you need for basic integration are theApplication IDandAdmin API Key.
Now that you’ve set up an Algolia application, you’re ready to integrate it into your Node.js app.
Implementing Search Functionality With Algolia
Algolia offers a client SDK for a wide range of programming languages, including Node.js which remains the top choice forserver-side JavaScript. The Node.js SDK makes it easy to use Algolia with JavaScript.
Start by installing thealgoliasearchnpm package:
The next step is to initialize the client in your project. In a file calledalgolia.js, importalgoliasearch, then initialize a new client using your API credentials:
You’ll use the Algolia client instance for further operations in your project.
Algolia uses search indexes to store data that you can search. A search index is similar to a database table that you can query to fetch data from. After initializing your client, you need to create an index to store data. For example, here’s how you might create an index to store cars:
This line creates an index in your application calledcarsand stores a reference to it in thecarsIndexvariable.
Next, you should add data to your index so that you’re able to search for it. You should always prepare your data as an array of objects, and ensure that each object has theobjectIDproperty to uniquely identify it.
Write some code to define the data you want to add to the Algoila index:
Algolia uses thesaveObjectsmethod to add data to a specific index. This function accepts a list of objects as argument and returns a promise. You can use theawaitkeyword with it if you need to use its output data.
Here’s how you would add all the cars in thecarsarray to thecarsIndexin your Algolia application:
When you run this function, return to your application dashboard on Algolia, and scroll down to the indices. You’ll find thecarsindex there and, when you click on it, you’ll see its data.
Now that you have data in your index, you can query it for data using various search methods provided by Algolia.
To query data from thecarsindex, you’re able to use thesearchmethod of the SDK and pass a search query to it as an argument. The function treats the query as a regular expression and returns every match it finds in the index.
The following code defines a function to search the cars index using a query and print the results.
When you run this code, the program will print the car object that has a field whose value matches the wordHonda. The output will look something like this:
you may also search values that appear in other properties of the objects, and the function will return every match it finds.
Algolia lets you make properties searchable or not. For instance, to make onlybrandandmodelsearchable in the cars index, you can use thesetSettingsfunction to configure the restriction as the code below demonstrates.
This causes every other property to be unsearchable, so search queries will only run against thebrandandmodelproperties. Excluding properties comes in handy when you’re building real-world products where you have to ensuresecurity best practicesand prevent users from accessing private data through search.
Building Efficient Search Functionality With Algolia
Algolia is a very powerful technology and is one of the top choices for implementing lightning-fast search in web applications. It is also typo-tolerant and even allows you to adjust the level of typo-tolerance in your search.
You can always trust the performance of the search engine in your Node.js application when you implement it with Algolia. You can try implementing search in a real-world application, and browse through the documentation to discover more about Algolia.
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