Algolia & TypeSense - Setup & Integration
TypeSense and Algolia are both powerful, flexible, scalable digital AI search & discovery platform. They're both my platforms of choice for powering search for all of my clients, such as for Impact Office Supplies, Blue Ink and Culture Kings in their B2B and B2C eCommerce, Brisbane South PHN in their custom Laravel web applications and Statamic CMS website. Default search engines in websites are poor, and for businesses who rely on their customers finding the content or products they are looking for, it's vital to choose a powerful and scalable search provider like Algolia or TypeSense.
Capabilities - What I build with Algolia
A snapshot of the kinds of Algolia projects I most often take on. If yours sounds like one of these, we should talk.
Scalable & Reliable
No downtime, let Algolia/TypeSense handle your products and experience thanks to its future-proof infrastructure. 10,000+ servers globally, 100+ data centers on 6 continents, and 99.999% SLA for enterprise customers
High-Performance
Make your users benefit from a fast search and discovery experience and near real-time pricing and inventory updates. Most of our search queries take from 1 to 20 milliseconds to process. That’s up to 200 times faster than competitors.
Enterprise-Ready
Benefit from Algolia and TypeSense’s data security and privacy, global availability and support to help you secure and grow your business. SSO, SAML, SOC2, SOC3, ISO27001 & HIPAA compliant.
Major Platform Integrations
Algolia and TypeSense power unified and transformational search and discovery experiences to boost conversions through all major ecommerce platforms. Salesforce, Adobe Commerce Magento, Shopify, Commerce Tools, BigCommerce, Laravel, React, Vue, and many (many) more.
Improve eCommerce Metrics
Through accurate search results, the ability to merchandise your results with pinning specific brands or products, and personalised results based on real-life AI data. Hyper-personalisation with AI-led optimisations surface exactly what your shoppers are looking for including longtail searches. Provide unbeatable relevancy, capture and convert instantly.
Improve Results through Analytics
The search analytics found in Algolia and TypeSense will give you in-depth detail on what your customers and users are doing. Key metrics such as total searches, users, no-result rate, click-through rate, conversion, and avg click position, through to deeper results such as daily search information, popular searches, popular results, and no result searches.
Case Studies - Featured Case Studies that use Algolia
These showcased projects serve as a window into my expertise in the realm of Algolia & TypeSense - Setup & Integration. Carefully selected to represent a variety of solutions, they demonstrate the diverse capabilities I bring to the table.
Impact Office Supplies eCommerce Website (B2B & B2C)
Impact Office Supplies is Australia’s leading independent office supplies store, enabling Australia-wide businesses and communities to order your office supplies online with ease.
Delivery Management Software
A powerful delivery management solution streamlining logistics, enhancing real-time tracking, and optimising operations.
Pasifika and Māori Health and Wellbeing Strategy Website
A website that provides online strategy updates, a services search engine and resources for local community service providers to support Pasifika and Maori peoples.
Impact Education eCommerce Website (B2B & B2C)
Educators can easily build booklists, and parents can order safely, while knowing they're dealing from an authorised booklist supplier.
The Difference - Specialist search work. None of the agency add-on treatment.
For most agencies, Algolia or TypeSense is an add-on bolted onto a site they were already building, configured by whichever developer was free that week. I work the other way around. Search is a specialism I have integrated for clients like Impact Office Supplies, Blue Ink, Culture Kings, and Brisbane South PHN, and the same person scoping the integration is the one writing the indexers, tuning the relevance, and integrating the frontend.
Your current agency
Senior names on the proposal. Juniors on the code.
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Search is treated as an add-on, configured by whichever junior or intermediate happens to be on the project that week.
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Communication is routed through account managers who filter what gets asked and what answer you receive.
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Relevance, ranking, and personalisation decisions are made by people who have never run a production search index.
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Search is scoped by people who won't be writing the code, and the actual integration gets handed to juniors learning the platform on your project.
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After launch, you are handed to a maintenance team you have never spoken to and have to re-explain the integration.
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“Maintenance” means leaving the index alone until something breaks, with no analytics review or relevance tuning.
Working with me
The senior on the proposal is the one writing the code.
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I am the senior. I personally design the indexing strategy, write the indexers, tune relevance, and integrate the frontend.
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You talk to me directly. No account manager filtering questions on the way in or answers on the way back.
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Configuration and trade-offs are decided by someone who has tuned Algolia and TypeSense indexes against real production traffic across B2B and B2C sites.
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I scope it, design the index architecture, and write the integration myself. The decisions are made by someone who has shipped this before at scale.
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The same developer who built it stays with you. Most of my clients have been around for five to seven years.
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Search analytics are reviewed regularly, relevance is retuned as your catalogue and traffic shift, and the index is treated as something that needs ongoing care.
“We have used Jonathan for a number of years to develop and maintain our rather complicated Online Portal and website. Jonathan is always extremely responsive to requests and proactive in ensuring our online presence is safe, presents well and is functional to our customers needs. We would definitely recommend Jonathan for your custom web development needs.”
“Digital Bird is my first pick for delivering web projects on time, on budget and to the brief — every time. Beyond being a delight to work with, Jonathan Bird is that rare breed of developer who is both masterful on the tools (an absolute Laravel whizz!) while also being adept at engaging the client in UX-thinking, to which he applies expert insights, gained through years of experience, to help further improve the end design for the target user’s experience. This powerful combination of skills means that 4 years on and a variety of projects later (from search directories to corporate website developments), Digital Bird firmly remains my first pick for developer.”
“We’ve been working with Jonathan Bird for our website maintenance, and he has been nothing short of exceptional. Jonathan consistently goes above and beyond, responding quickly whenever we need help and resolving issues with impressive turnaround time. His communication is clear and thorough — he always explains what the problem was, how he fixed it, and provides helpful recommendations for long-term solutions. It’s rare to find someone this reliable and proactive. Highly recommend!”
“Digital Bird has had a huge influence on our business providing many solutions besides just a fantastic reliable website. Jonathan is great to work with and has a solution to every challenge. Jonathan also has the ability to “dumb it down” and provide timely advice and assistance if something goes astray. With Jonathan we have in excess of 99% uptime on all three websites.”
“Velg Training has had an excellent experience working with Digital Bird. Jonathan has supported us with a complex Laravel/PHP website and has brought a rare mix of deep technical knowledge, practical problem solving, and clear communication. He has assisted with major infrastructure and platform work across AWS, Laravel Forge, Cloudflare, Redis, S3, Sentry, PayWay, Mailchimp/Mandrill and related integrations. His work has included setting up and migrating infrastructure, improving performance, resolving production issues, monitoring errors, modernising legacy code, and strengthening the reliability of key business workflows such as checkout, invoicing, membership exports, PDF generation, transactional emails and background queues. What stands out most is that Jonathan does not just “fix the ticket”. He investigates properly, explains the cause in plain language, and looks for the right long-term solution rather than quick patches. He has helped us move away from fragile legacy processes, improve automated testing, reduce errors, improve email reliability, address performance bottlenecks, and make the platform easier to maintain into the future. He is responsive, thorough and highly professional, with an obvious understanding of business-critical websites and custom web applications. We would happily recommend Jonathan to any organisation needing a skilled, reliable and commercially minded Laravel/PHP web developer.”
“Was an absolute pleasure to work with Jonathan. Could not be happier with our new website! Professional, responsive, brilliant communication from the beginning to go live. If you are fortunate enough to be in a conversation with Jonathan for a new site - just do it!”
“I’ve worked with Jonathan from Digital Bird for several years and found him to be a highly competent developer who often exceeds expectations. Together, we’ve collaborated on a number of medium-sized platforms serving hundreds of thousands of users, including learning management systems, a widely-used school well-being platform, trade promotion competition sites, and more. Jonathan is very skilled in API and platform integration, payment systems (such as Stripe), AWS, internet security, and more. As a Project Manager/Product Owner, I feel very confident working with Jonathan and recommending his services to our clients.”
“Highly recommend Jonathan for anything web development in Brisbane and Australia-wide. Have worked with a lot of developers over the years and Jonathan’s work and communication on projects has been a clear standout. A very talent developer if you’re looking for anything from WordPress, Shopify, Laravel, or anything in-between.”
“Jonathan Bird is one of the best I have worked with in this space. He is responsive, clever and contributes to the brief, and most importantly, he is a great person to work with. It can be hard to find the right people who can take on something and lift it to another dimension. Jonathan does that and more.”
“Jonathan Bird was instrumental in redesigning my business’ website and provided invaluable feedback throughout the entire process. The results far exceeded my expectations. They then went above and beyond and met all deadlines in revamping the site again, when we re branded our business. Jonathan has been managing our website updates and hosting ever since and, with more than 10 years industry experience, is always able to add value, solve problems and exceed expectations. I highly recommend him.”
You’re in good company
From the Blog - Search Platform Articles & Migration Guides
Practical insights on search platform integration, migration strategies, and performance optimisation from hands-on experience building search solutions for eCommerce and web applications.