manoelsanQ: Hi there SearchIQ team, This is the first time many of us have heard about you, even though it seems you ...
have been around for a few years already. Could you please clarify the following points, so we can get to know you better?
1. What makes you different from other search widgets? I'm particularly interested about your comparison with Algolia. More than the differences in pricing models (Algolia's and SearchIQ are clearly priced differently), I'm interested about the technical features. How far can you go with SearchIQ compared to how far can we go with Algolia (or other relevant competitors you may have)?
2. How far can we go in customizing the UI of the search results page?
3. How you'd say you have improved your product during the last few years. As per your Wordpress-plugin page (https://wordpress.org/plugins/searchiq/), it seems that you've been around since at least five years ago. What has improved since then?
4. Can you tell us a bit about the founders or whoever is leading SearchIQ?
5. Do you have a public roadmap?
Good luck with the Appsumo launch! Your product seems promising indeed.
Thanks,
Manuel
Rayhon_SearchIQ
May 14, 2024A: Sorry for the late reply. Those are all interesting questions and I would try my best to address them here.
# Answer for Question 1:
* Algolia is a bigger company and it has invested substantially to develop its own search engine and infrastructure for the sake of squeeze out tens of milliseconds faster for each search query. On the other hand, searchIQ built on top of popular open-source ElasticSearcht with a goal to help every site to enable a high-quality search experience with ease without any help from developers.
* We have a search cloud in our data center. Our query latency is around 50ms-100ms in US depending on their locations. However, we don't have any servers outside US so search latency will not be as good if your users are in other countries. For VIP clients, we will leverage amazon cloud to cut down the network latency globally but the cost will be at $1000+ per month.
* To optimize the latency, we also provide image resizing service and deliver all images over CDN network.
* For non-wordpress site, searchIQ has it own crawler infrastructure like google and we can index your site periodically to make sure your latest content is searchable shortly. I am not sure if Algolia does it.
* Although searchIQ is not as big as Algolia, we are not a small tech shop as well. You can see us on parenting.com, mywedding.com, thepennyhoarder.com, life.com, and many more high profile websites in US. The only problem is we haven’t put too much time and resources in marketing or documentation b/c we are a group of tech guys that get more excited about solving tech issues. We certainly will address that in a near future.
# Answer for Question 2
* As of now, you can only do your customization over CSS. And if you are in PRO package, our UX designer can help you out. For wordpress, we are working on integrating with the native search so you can keep your existing search result page. For non-wordpress, we are working on an api for websites that want to keep their own search result page design.
# Answer for Question 3
* Yes, we released our initial wordpress plugin 5 years ago. Over the last few years, we focused on getting more big clients on us to solidify our infrastructure and streamline our operation. We have flushed out most lots of issues over this exercise. In terms of tech, we started looking into bringing AI onto search given the NLP space has been changed quite a bit by deep learning over the last few years. Our current goal is to provide you semantic search rather than literal search.
Due to the character limit, I may end here as of now. If you are still interested in the other questions, leave me a comment. Enjoy!
Verified purchaser
this is good product using a very popular open source Elastic Search, the pricing is very good too. Hope SearchIQ become more popular and successful in wp space. I will purchase from you due to good product. Please focus on your marketing more.