Search-as-a-Service provider Algolia debuts free plan, opens West Coast data center

Do you use Genius (formerly, RapGenius) to search for rap lyrics? Do you use CrunchBase to look up an interesting company you’ve just read about, or perhaps Product Hunt to search for emoji-related products?

If you’ve answered yes to any or all of the above, you’ve already interacted with a startup named Algolia, which powers these sites’ search engines. And since it’s such a useful and powerful tool, Algolia is announcing today that it will provide a free plan for small-scale hackers and developers. It’s also announcing that it has a new and fourth data center in California, new search capabilities, location-based search for mobile apps, and a redesigned dashboard.

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Algolia’s new free Hacker Plan is geared towards the small-scale developer experimenting with the tool or working on a side project that needs to be cost- and resource-light. Through the free plan, developers “get access to the full functionality of the service,” Algolia co-founder and chief executive Nicolas Dessaigne told me. The free plan has no restrictions in terms of features and capabilities, although it is limited to 1,000 records and 50,000 API calls per month.

Algolia is also rolling out a few new capabilities for its API, which will be readily available without any additional adjustments necessary to activate them. Inspired by its e-commerce customers and the search challenges they often face, Algolia’s search will now adjust the length of queries in order to always return some results. This means that if a query originally has five words but returns no results, the API will cut the last word and run that query, or cut one more word and run that query, and so on until the search finds results.

Algolia’s API will now also query variants of the word someone runs a search for and return the closest results, largely to work around possible typos or mistakes. It can also take into consideration synonyms, again to ensure it captures the maximum available results.

Mobile apps using Algolia’s search API can now also benefit from location-based results. This will obviously be a boon to app developers whose apps help people find things like businesses or attractions nearby, for example.

As mentioned, the company is also announcing that it has opened a new data center (its fourth), this time in California. Its three others are in Asia and Europe and on the East Coast.

“The whole idea behind that is that we’re so focused on speed of search,” said Dessaigne. Because search queries have to go to Algolia’s servers, process their search, and go back to serve up the results, having its data centers physically close to where the searches originate makes a significant difference.

The company now has about 350 paying customers in 40 countries, which means expanding its data center presence will become more and more crucial as it continues to grow. The company declined to share where its next data center will be, although Dessaigne said it will be in line with where its customers can already be found.

Along with the customers mentioned earlier, Algolia is now also powering search for Sunrise (the calendar), Y Combinator’s Hacker News, A Little Market (an Etsy company), and Livestream. The company now processes more than three billion API calls per month.

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Algolia was founded in 2012 by Dessaigne and Julien Lemoine and is now headquartered in San Francisco, with an office in Paris, France. The company has raised a total of $2.8 million in funding from Y Combinator, Storm Ventures, 500 Startups, Index Ventures, Point Nine Capital, and Alven Capital. It was part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2014 batch.