Scaling to billions: How Agora elevates e-commerce search with Meilisearch AI

Agora chose Meilisearch to power lightning-fast, intuitive, and scalable search experiences across millions of ecommerce products.

Agora is a revolutionary ecommerce search platform aiming to become the decentralized "world store,” which aggregates products from thousands of smaller online shops into one cohesive marketplace.

It's built for shoppers looking to effortlessly discover, compare, and purchase products from multiple vendors within one unified cart. Agora has ambitious scaling plans, aiming to index up to 1 billion products by the end of 2025. To do this, the team needed a blazing-fast solution capable of delivering relevant search results instantly and at scale.

“Meilisearch's combination of semantic search and speed was the best we’ve seen on the market” - Param Jaggi, CEO & Founder at Agora

Challenge: building lightning-fast, relevant search across diverse ecommerce platforms at massive scale

As Agora's dataset rapidly grew from millions toward a projected billion product listings, their initial search setup faced significant hurdles that threatened user experience and growth:

• Challenge: aggregating and standardizing diverse data sources Agora pulls product data from thousands of Shopify and WooCommerce stores, each with unique data structures. To create a unified shopping experience, Agora faced a challenge of standardizing complex data into one comprehensive schema that could be seamlessly indexed and searched.

• Challenge: providing immediate, relevant search results. Initially, Agora used Mongo Atlas Search, where search queries often took 5 to 10 seconds. It significantly deteriorated user experience and conversions. Agora required a solution delivering instant results to ensure users discovered the right products rapidly and confidently, even for complex or ambiguous queries.

• Challenge: maintaining control and flexibility over AI embeddings. Previous search solutions did not provide Agora with sufficient control over their own vector embeddings, limiting flexibility and customization. Agora sought a solution enabling them to leverage their embeddings, fine-tune relevancy, and experiment freely with semantic and keyword search combinations.

Solution: Leveraging Meilisearch’s hybrid AI search engine for exceptional ecommerce discovery

Agora turned to Meilisearch for its powerful combination of speed, intuitive semantic search capabilities, and unmatched ease of customization. Meilisearch addressed Agora’s challenges head-on by:

• Lightning-fast search-as-you-type results: Meilisearch processes searches in under 100 milliseconds, allowing real-time, dynamic result updates as users type, significantly increasing relevancy and conversion rates.
• Hybrid semantic & keyword search powered by vector embeddings: Agora leverages Meilisearch’s AI-powered semantic search capabilities by integrating OpenAI’s CLIP model embeddings. This allowed customers to intuitively search for products using both textual input as well as search by image.
• Customizable schema and indexing flexibility: Meilisearch’s loosely typed document structure enabled Agora to standardize and index complex product data across diverse sources.

Implementation: how Agora built a blazing-fast product search with Meilisearch

To deliver fast, relevant, and intuitive search experiences, Agora implemented Meilisearch as follows:

1. Multi-source product crawling: using its own custom crawler called “Hermes”, Agora scraped and standardized product data from diverse Shopify and WooCommerce storefronts into a single structured format optimized for indexing with Meilisearch.
2. Leveraging advanced embeddings for semantic discovery: Agora then integrated Cohere for semantic text embeddings and OpenAI’s CLIP model to generate powerful semantic embeddings for products' images. These embeddings augmented keyword searches, enabling a hybrid search that blended semantic depth and keyword precision, drastically enhancing result quality.
3. Real-time search optimization through filtering, sorting, and ranking rules: Meilisearch helped Agora refine search relevancy by balancing semantic and keyword search. This was essential for complex e-commerce queries and creative product names. By weighting semantic search, Agora prioritized relevant terms within context, ensuring accurate results even with unconventional naming.

Results: transforming ecommerce search with AI-powered discovery

Adopting Meilisearch helped Agora’s team overcome their biggest search challenges, significantly improving their user experience and driving measurable performance gains.

Some of the results include:

• Dramatically improved search speeds: Search queries, previously averaging around 2 seconds, now return in approximately 300 milliseconds (with core Meilisearch responses at just under 100 milliseconds). Agora's team is confident in further reducing this down below 200 milliseconds, significantly improving user satisfaction and search conversion rates.
• Increased conversions and customer trust: Since implementing Meilisearch, Agora saw a 1.7x to 2x increase in weekly user retention and a notable uptick in order conversions, directly attributed to the improved search experience and consistently relevant results.
• Enhanced discovery with semantic embeddings: Agora’s users can intuitively search through both text and images, easily discovering desired products using natural language or visual descriptions. Embeddings also unlocked new capabilities like strong similarity-based recommendations, expanding product discovery avenues for shoppers.

Conclusion: empowering Agora’s ambitious vision for a unified "World Store“

Agora's mission to create a unified marketplace experience across millions—soon billions—of products demands an exceptional search solution that balances speed, relevance, and flexibility.

Meilisearch proved to be the perfect choice, enabling Agora to seamlessly scale its product catalog while maintaining outstanding search performance, intuitive semantic discovery, and ultimate flexibility.

With Meilisearch’s powerful hybrid search engine, Agora is confidently positioned to deliver a truly transformative e-commerce experience.