Search

What Are Search APIs?

Search APIs power the discovery layer of every content-rich application. They range from general-purpose web search (indexing the entire internet) to specialised full-text search you host within your own product data. The most important trend in search in 2024–2026 is the shift toward semantic search: instead of matching exact keywords, vector-based search retrieves results by meaning, enabling queries like "cheap comfortable shoes for walking" to find relevant products even when none of those exact words appear in the product description.

Types of Search Developers Implement

• Web search APIs — query Bing or Google Programmable Search to surface external web results within your app
• Full-text search — index your own documents and query them with relevance ranking, facets, and typo tolerance
• Semantic / vector search — find results by meaning using embedding models and a vector database
• E-commerce product search — faceted filtering by price, category, brand with personalised ranking
• Enterprise knowledge search — search across internal wikis, Notion pages, Confluence, and Slack
• AI-augmented search — hybrid combining BM25 keyword search with semantic reranking for best recall and precision

Choosing a Search Provider

Algolia is the managed search leader — blazing fast, globally distributed, with a generous 10K operations/month free tier and excellent SDKs. Typesense is the open-source Algolia alternative — self-hostable, Apache 2.0 licensed, and increasingly popular for cost-sensitive teams. Meilisearch excels at developer experience with zero-config relevance, an intuitive REST API, and both cloud and self-hosted options. For web search APIs, Bing Search API (Azure) is the most reliable with 1,000 free transactions/month. For hybrid semantic search, combine any of the above with pgvector or Pinecone for the embedding retrieval step.