Case Study: The Times achieves 300–500× faster search and saves ~4 hours weekly in production with Algolia

Boosting production productivity at The Times through high-performing, highly-relevant search

The Times, a long-standing UK news publisher, needed a faster way for editors to build daily online editions. Its internal CMS and a custom in-browser search made Edition Builder slow and frustrating—indexing could take ~3 seconds per article, searches were limited to a 72-hour window, and result relevance and filtering were poor—creating a major production bottleneck for teams who review hundreds of stories each evening.

The Times replaced the prior search with Algolia in a matter of days, using a hosted index, search-as-you-type, rules, and faceting to deliver fresher, more relevant results and flexible filters by topic, author, date and more. The change made searches 300–500x faster, enabled reliable queries across 250,000+ articles, saved roughly 3.5–4 hours per week across 36 users, and gave editors transparent, easy control over relevance while reducing maintenance overhead.

The Times

Matt Taylor

Editorial Product Manager