Case Study: Meta achieves sub-50ms search for 35M files with Algolia

Meta Uses Algolia’s technology to make 35 million files searchable in milliseconds. (beta)

Meta is an organizational search platform that uses intelligent tagging to let users find and edit files across devices and cloud services from a single interface. As a fast‑growing startup handling 35 million files and multiple cloud integrations, Meta needed a low‑maintenance, highly accurate search that could work alongside its smart‑tagging system without draining engineering resources.

Meta adopted Algolia’s hosted search, restructuring its data and creating “smart indices” to mirror its tagging logic and integrating with cloud backups and string processing. The result: search latencies of about 40–50 ms (typically ~47 ms), a 40% reduction in time‑to‑market, strong user feedback on real‑time results, and the ability for the team to focus on product growth as they scale to enterprise usage.

Meta

Aaron Taylor

Co-founder and CTO