Learn Algolia and Mongodb

Today’s users expect great things from their search experiences — speed, relevance, and usability, to name a few. Algolia provides developers with out-of-the-box and customizable search experiences that are a joy to build.

This introductory course on the Algolia search solution focuses on the user-facing part of search. Using the Algolia InstantSearch.js front-end library, we’ll see how to build an engaging search experience in no time. (28 minutes, to be exact.) 

**Prerequisites:** 
You don’t need previous experience with search to follow this course — we’ll use an example index with an e-commerce data set preconfigured. We will work mainly in JavaScript, so basic JS knowledge is expected.

If you want to play with your own index settings and data set, you can [create a free Algolia account here](https://www.algolia.com/users/sign_up/hacker/?utm_medium=link&utm_source=egghead&utm_campaign=education), but this is not required to follow along with this first course. 

Algolia's full suite APIs enable teams to develop unique search and discovery experiences for their customers across all platforms and devices. Type a query. Click a link. Open an app. Everything your customers do sends a signal about what they want. Algolia decodes that intent to deliver the right content - instantly.

algolia

Getting Started with Algolia InstantSearch.js

MongoDB has a quite powerful aggregation framework that allows you to write data processing pipelines. Documents in the MongoDB collection go through a series of stages or a pipeline that transforms them into an aggregated result. In this short video series, you will learn how to write aggregations in MongoDB.

mongodb

MongoDB Aggregation Framework

The stats widget is used to display useful insights about the current results like the number of hits and the time taken to compute the results inside the engine.

Inform users about the current result set with Instantsearch JS Stats widget

The first step to implement Algolia on the front end using Instantsearch : importing and setting up the library with your credentials. This is what will allow the library to initiate the connection to Algolia servers and the first step to complete before adding some useful widgets.

Set up the Instantsearch JS Library

In this lesson we’ll build a search experience reduced to it’s 2 essential components : a search input and the displayed results. As simple as it is, to build this from scratch would require a fair amount of work. Between listening to the input, making the api call, parsing and displaying the result... To build this using Algolia’s Instantsearch library requires a few lines of code with simply two widgets: the Searchbox and the Hits widget.

Search an Algolia Index with Instantsearch JS searchbox and hits widgets

Displaying barebones Hits won’t catch your user’s attention. The UI is key to provide a good search experience and hits are the meat of this experience so they need extra attention. By using Mustache templating we’ll see how to display rich results to your users. 

Display Rich results with templates in the Hits widget for Instantsearch JS

Every  good search UX make users understand instantly why a given hit is being displayed as part of the result set. One way to achieve that is to highlight the keywords from the query directly inside the Hits. This is built in the API JSON response and in this video we’ll explain how to leverage it easily.

Highlight Keywords in Query Results using the Instantsearch JS Hits Widget

Searching is obviously not limited to inputting text in a searchbox. If your dataset allows it Algolia can leverage of attributes and values. To make use of those facets on the front end, one of the most common widget that you can find in a search UI is the refinement list. With this widget, the user can filter the dataset based on facets. This widget only displays the most relevant facets for the current search context.

Filter Datasets with Facets using Instantsearch JS to add a Refinement List

The hierarchical menu widget is used to create a navigation based on a hierarchy of facet attributes. We generally implement it for categories with subcategories.

Browse results based on a hierarchy of Facets (HierarchicalMenu) in Instantsearch JS

The range input is a simple but useful widget that allows a user filter the results by selecting a numeric range with a minimum and maximum input. In an e-commerce website for instance, this widget would be useful to limit the results where the price is comprised between $X and $Y.

Refine a dataset using a numeric range in Instantsearch JS with the Range Input widget

When performing a complex query, based on several active facets and filters, its tedious for the user to start from scratch if she has to unset all refinements one by one. Thanks to the clearAll widget, this task becomes a one click action for the user and is trivial to implement for us developers as it requires no configuration.

Reset all active refinements with the clearRefinements Instantsearch JS widget

When you have a large result set for a specific query and usually not displaying more than a few dozen simultaneously. Pagination is a popular widget that allows the user to switch between pages of the results.

Paginate Large Sets of Algolia Data with Instantsearch JS Pagination widget

All Instantsearch widgets are added to the page in a similar fashion and they also share a number of common options that we’ll cover in this video. We will be playing with a dummy menu widget that won’t be part of the final project just to showcase all those options.

How to Add Instantsearch JS widgets and their common attributes 

Aggregation in MongoDB is really powerful and allows you to create solid pipelines to extract and transform data. This is an introductory video that aims to demonstrate the basics of aggregation — we will see how to create some basic pipeline to extract data using `$match` and manipulate the output using `$project` stages.

The aggregation stages/operators covered in this video are:

* [`$match`](https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/operator/aggregation/match/index.html)
* [`$project`](https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/operator/aggregation/project/index.html)
* [`$concat`](https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/operator/aggregation/concat/)

You can see the list of all the [available operators in the MongoDB docs](https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/operator/aggregation/)


Find and Manipulate Data using Aggregation in MongoDB

In our last lesson, we learnt the basics of MongoDB aggregation and saw how we can [find and manipulate data](https://egghead.io/lessons/mongodb-find-and-manipulate-data-using-aggregation-in-mongodb). In this continuation, we will see how we can sort, skip and limit records during our aggregation stages.

The aggregation stages/operators covered in this video are:

* [`$sort`](https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/operator/aggregation/sort/index.html)
* [`$skip`](https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/operator/aggregation/skip/index.html)
* [`$limit`](https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/operator/aggregation/limit/index.html)

You can see the list of all the [available operators in the MongoDB docs.](https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/operator/aggregation/)

Sort, Skip and Limit Records in MongoDB Aggregation

Mongoose provides a straight-forward, schema-based solution to model your application data. It includes built-in type casting, validation, query building, business logic hooks and more, out of the box.

mongoose

One of the great things about NoSQL databases is that you do not have to decide on your data schema while developing. As you get closer to production though, you'll often want to more clearly define the shape of the data you are working with.

Enforce Schemas in MongoDB using Mongoose Models

Unlike the relational databases, MongoDB doesn't allow you to join collections using the simple `find` queries, but you can write the join queries using the aggregation framework. In this lesson, we learn how to join two collections to get the data in the format we want.

The aggregation operators that we cover in this video are:

- [`$lookup`](https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/operator/aggregation/lookup/index.html)
- [`$project`](https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/operator/aggregation/project/index.html)
- [`$arrayElemAt`](https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/operator/aggregation/arrayElemAt/index.html)

You can see the list of all the [available operators in the MongoDB docs.](https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/operator/aggregation/)

Write Joins in MongoDB

[In our last lesson](https://egghead.io/lessons/mongodb-group-by-and-sum-in-mongodb?pl=mongodb-aggregation-framework-3e5d), we saw how we can use `$group` operator to simulate `GROUP BY` operations that you might be aware from SQL. A minor gimmick with `$group` is that it only works with the scalar field values and not arrays. There might be times when you would want to group by some array fields; in this lesson, we learn how to do that using `$unwind` operator

Here is the list of operators that we cover in this lesson:

- [$unwind](https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/operator/aggregation/unwind/index.html)
- [$group](https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/operator/aggregation/group/index.html)
- [$sort](https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/operator/aggregation/sort/index.html)
- [$limit](https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/operator/aggregation/limit/index.html)

You can see the list of all the [available operators in the MongoDB docs](https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/operator/aggregation/).


Perform Group Operations on Array Fields in MongoDB

In this lesson, we learn how to group documents in a collection using `$group` operator similar to `GROUP BY` in SQL. We also look at `$sum` operator and see how we can use it to count the number of documents as well as get sum of some field in our grouped results.

Here is the list of operators that we cover in this lesson:

* [`$group`](https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/operator/aggregation/group/index.html)
* [`$sum`](https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/operator/aggregation/sum/index.html)
* [`$sort`](https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/operator/aggregation/sort/index.html)

You can see the list of all the [available operators in the MongoDB docs](https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/operator/aggregation/).


Group By and Sum in MongoDB

Express is a minimal and flexible Node.js web application framework that provides a robust set of features for web and mobile applications.

express

Mongoose allows you to easily select resources by ID from your MongoDB. This is an important aspect to creating an API.

Select by ID with Mongoose and Express

Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.

node

Learn how to import data into your MongoDB and then use Express to serve a simple Node.js API.

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