How does this compare to Algolia? I was shocked at the irony when I discovered that Firebase docs recommended using Algolia for full-text search queries over Firebase data.
I think that has to do with the fact that both Algolia and Firebase went through YC. IIRC, PG stated that the first 100 or so customers of YC companies are in fact YC Companies. I think Firebase decided to give Algolia a try early on and decided to stick with them since.
The thing that’s kind of wild is that Firestore, which is their new reimplementation of the original Firebase db (now Realtime Database), is what is recommending Algolia:
Given a clean slate I would have thought they might push Cloud Search or this service, even without any special integration. Candidly I haven’t taken the time to understand either of those offerings but I have to assume you could could index JSON documents just as easily as with Algolia. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; it was just surprising to see them promote a third party in general and a search engine specifically. After having used 90+ Google products over the last 17 years, transacted many millions of with them, and read innumerable pages of docs, I’ve not really seen anything quite like that— where a quite common use case of their product actively promotes a competitor and links to them.
