Why Hosted Search Made Sense for Grantmakers.io
In Part I of this post, I announced two major additions to Grantmakers.io, a site I built to help nonprofit fundraisers find basic information on US-based foundations. The new features are powered by Algolia, a leader in hosted search.
In this Part II, I’ll explain why integrating Algolia made sense from a developer perspective.
Background
Last year I began hacking around the #OpenData set released by the IRS. The dataset contains all electronically-filed tax filings from US nonprofits and are provided in machine-readable form. Those early explorations combined with a serendipitous series of events led me to launch Grantmakers.io earlier this year.
The site started as a basic static site containing 69k profiles of US foundations, based entirely on the IRS dataset. It allowed nonprofit professionals free, easy access to basic information on potential funding sources.
There was a major problem though. Many of the static profiles contained tens of thousands of individual grant listings (e.g., the Ford Foundation profile listed over 3,000 grants, which I presented in a simple HTML table). The UX experience of scrolling through thousands of table rows left much to be desired. Insights were hard to uncover from the basic tables, and page load times were lengthy.
I needed search functionality, but something that worked well with static sites. I briefly considered static-friendly search libraries like List.js, but most required loading the MBs worth of grants data into local memory or involved fairly complex work arounds.
I knew about Algolia already, but hadn’t yet tried out their InstantSearch product. I opened up the docs, fired up my text editor, and felt compelled to write the following tweet within 30 minutes:
In the end, Algolia’s hosted search won out over all other options, primarily for the following reasons:
Zero ongoing maintenance
Grantmakers is a solo project. As an independent developer I simply don’t have the bandwidth to keep a network of servers updated, secure, and optimized. Algolia handles 100% of DevOps, allowing me to focus my efforts on launching new features to give new visitors a reason to return.
Limitless infrastructure
Grantmakers is growing rapidly. Though it started as a side project, pageviews have grown nearly tenfold and more and more nonprofit professionals are using the site to uncover insights into foundations. It doesn’t matter if the site drives 4 searches or 4 million, “scale search infrastructure” will never appear on our roadmap.
Fast development
Grantmakers is a community project. The community drives what information is pulled from Form 990-PF, presented in profiles, and appears in search results. Being responsive to these requests is what keeps visitors coming back. Using Algolia’s libraries, I can add search features (‘widgets’ in Algolia terms) in mere minutes.
Search made easy
Grantmakers has no back-end developers. My core expertise is in product strategy and my development experience mostly front-end. While I’m comfortable dipping my toes into the back-end if necessary, developing fast and relevant search involves complex algorithms requiring extensive fine tuning and a top CS degree. With Algolia, I can leverage their default ranking algorithm and fine tune it as needed using their GUI dashboard or API.
The result
The result was a drastically improved UX for visitors.
Thanks to a simple tech stack, open data, and the Algolia for Open Source program, Grantmakers was built at zero cost, has zero ongoing maintenance costs, and is forever free for users.
The charitable world has long deserved modern, world-class search. Thanks to Algolia, that’s now a reality.
Thanks for reading,
Chad Kruse, Creator of Grantmakers.io
Getting started with Algolia
Though JavaScript is my language of choice, Algolia provides a number of libraries and plugins from Ruby and Go to Shopify and Wordpress.
If you’re looking for a quick boilerplate to explore the basics, feel free to clone my Jekyll boilerplate (Jekyll + Materialize + Algolia InstantSearch).
