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Comment by searchfaster | Hacker News Reader

Yes.. this is something our startup is working on fixing. How you sort and how you prioritize your fields to be searched are all configurable at query time.

If you pay for a million records, you should be able to store a million records.

https://searchera.io

We are currently in beta and our website is not fully up but the demos give an idea of what is possible.

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Nice.

This brings up a related point.

How strong are the defensibility and separately the network effects in Algolia's business?

I guess once they have a customer, it might be annoying for that customer to switch. Is that accurate?

But is there any reason for the 101th customer to use Algolia other than the brand? My hunch says no, and that there aren't any network effects.

Thanks ! Actually 40% of our current beta users are existing Algolia customers. Maintaining separate indexes for every sorting / ranking option and intentionally restricting the application to stay under limit is a drawback that many complain about.

Our On-Premises option is something which a few potential customers have been interested in.

So won't you have the same problem?

Limited customer lock in?

Of course. We are doing our best to build a rock solid product which is fast, flexible, cost-effective with excellent support.

Finally, it is the customers call. They are going to choose what works best for them :)

The response times are six times as long as with Algolia. I assume because of latency.

Will you offer distributed datacenters as well?

Yes, we are currently hosted only in NY. Can you please ping beta.searchera.net and check the latency from your location ?

Once we are out of beta we will be offering distributed datacenters. West coast USA and Europe to start with. The option to install in your own servers / cloud provider is another option.

If you would like to try it out, I can always bring up a host quickly next to your location on digitalocean or aws. Please send me an email on hello@searchera.io

90ms from Europe

I signed up for your beta and will follow your progress.

Is your solution based on solr/lucene/elasticsearch?

Ours is a custom index written mostly in 'C' and bit of x86 assembly. It is very lightweight and extremely fast even without the use of replica indexes for every sort order.

Thanks for signing up.. Will get you started as soon as we have our additional servers up.

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