What's new on Algolia

Like you we, at Algolia, have been shocked and dismayed by the events of the last week in Ukraine. As a technology company, we are in a unique position of being able to create broad awareness of the events taking place in Ukraine. We believe that there are many people unaware of the situation because they live in societies with censored or strictly controlled media.

As a company proudly founded in France, we believe that protest is a powerful way to send a message. And, if you wish to join the protest, we can enable you and our other customers to send a clear message – “Stop the War in Ukraine” – across our Search Platform to the hundreds of millions of people that visit your websites or apps every day.

With this approach in mind, our development team created an optional messaging mechanism to help you, and our other customers, drive broad awareness, especially to those that may not have visibility of what is taking place in Ukraine. By opting into the “Support Ukraine” tag from your Algolia dashboard, you can share the message, for example, with the people of Russia, Belarus, and Chechnya: “Stop the War in Ukraine” and signal your support for a peaceful resolution.

With this feature, you can configure the search engine to behave differently depending upon where a search is performed without any coding. Full instructions are provided at the bottom of this email.

In all circumstances, we recommend that you secure and protect the smooth operation of your external-facing resources such as websites, APIs, and applications. If you detect or experience a cyberattack, take advantage of the emergency protection services provided by a CDN such as Cloudflare (https://www.cloudflare.com/under-attack-hotline/).

While we’re not naive enough to believe this alone will stop the war, by spreading awareness, we have a greater chance of making a difference.

Thank you.

The Algolia Team

Results Filter Instructions

Our development team created a special messaging mechanism in the Algolia search engine, called the Result Filter. With this feature, you can configure the search engine to behave differently depending upon where a search is performed.

For example, when any search is performed from a specified country, an item’s title, (or other selected attribute), will be replaced with the message “Stop the War in Ukraine”:

For all other searches outside the specified country, customers will see normal results.

How to enable this on your site:

• You click on the setting “Support Ukraine” in the “Configuration” section of your dashboard. Here, you can enable or disable the feature. It takes effect as soon as you click on ‘Save’.

Then complete the following details:

• Choose the attribute you wish to replace, for example: “title”.
• Change the wording of the message. For example, “Stop the War in Ukraine”.
• Target a specific country or countries (based on country codes and their associated country IPs).
• Set a “probability” value, which will determine the number of times the message is displayed. For example, 100 means all of the time; 90 is a high-frequency message rate.

Note that this is an index setting; therefore, if you have multiple indexes, you’ll need to enable the message on all your indexes.