Case Study: Amplitude achieves 1000x faster in-app search with Algolia Search

Amplitude speeds up in-app search functionality 1000x with Algolia Search

Amplitude, a product analytics company that helps organizations build better products through data, faced a critical challenge: its in-app search—built on internal database tables—became unacceptably slow at scale (worst‑case searches took up to 30 seconds), while needing to meet complex privacy and enterprise security requirements. As Amplitude grew and added large customers, the team needed a scalable, secure search solution that wouldn’t add ongoing maintenance burden.

Amplitude adopted Algolia (InstantSearch, Search API, replica indexes) as a quick-to-implement, easy-to-configure SaaS solution with enterprise encryption and on-prem options to satisfy privacy needs and integrate a complex permissions model. The result: search latency dropped roughly 1000x to about 30 ms, customers began using search more, user experience and collaboration improved dramatically, and engineering overhead for maintaining search was greatly reduced (full resync <1 min, reindex <10 s).

Amplitude

Ryan Kahn

Engineering Manager