Algolia

Raised as a usability problem by 12 people on Hacker News over 12 years (2015–2026), in 11 threads.

People raised many different problems with Algolia, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 12 complaints

Can't find the old admin key used in frontend, and key types were not clearly distinguished2026-03-14
Search documentation and fine controls are lousy; unclear whether usernames are matched2025-08-16
Users find Algolia search results slower to locate content than a Google site search2024-10-12
Search results feel naively selected and the search UI is poor2024-10-12
Date range selection is cumbersome, with dates hard to read or invisible2024-08-12
Search on sites using Algolia fails to find terms that exist2022-12-28
Must whitelist many JavaScript domains through trial and error before search works2022-01-25
Unsubscribe link leads to a blank page, so user can't stop emails2021-10-15
Can't use site search from browser keyword shortcut, forcing many clicks and visual hunting2018-09-02
Same query returns different results depending on whether Enter was pressed2018-03-23
Search returns useless results and can't find previously visited articles2015-09-20
Thumbnail images load slowly and annoyingly on slow connections2015-07-23