Question: Using 3rd Party Services for Search

[jessehall3]

Hello Folks,
cc @miekof

After attending my first meeting on this project, I learned that there was some interest in looking into using something like Elasticsearch for better searching through all the fields. Some obvious concerns were added maintenance and cost.

Looking around, and not having researched this before, I came across algolia, which I think might be a good fit for this project.

Some niceties include:

1. Ease of use -- Setting it up is as simple as sending JSON and a list of searchable attributes. I tried this myself. We can send queries directly to their servers, and back, without anything in between.
2. Free or Low Cost -- It has free and discount programs for open source projects, as well as a free tier for all users which might serve our needs as is.
3. It maintains a UI library with widgets.

That said, I wanted to post this information and see what folks had to say -- maybe someone had already explored this particular service or had other information related to the current work on search.

I'm going to continue doing some background research and hopefully will be able to contribute to some of the search related tasks on the project board.

Please let me know what y'all think.

Thanks,
Jesse

[jessehall3]

I ran into my first snag with this. Given that Google App Script requires that you use UrlFetchApp to make requests, it eliminates a straight forward use of algolia's javscript SDK .

My thought now would be to create a google cloud function just responsible for taking in JSON sent from the spreadsheet and sending it to a database in algolia. I'm am now looking into this.