The challenge

Since Cafeyn shares 150 new magazine issues and articles each day, their search engine is an absolutely critical part of their businesses success. On the open-source search platform they were using, indexing was slow, unreliable, and uncustomizable. To make any updates, their technical team had to allocate their already limited resources to refining the search engine. 

Before switching to Algolia, readers were only able to search for precise magazine or newspaper titles, not significant keywords or ideas within texts. And if their search query wasn’t exactly correct—for example, if dashes or apostrophes were missing or misplaced—customers would get poor, unrelated search results.

The solution

In desperate need of a higher performing search experience, LeKiosk turned to Algolia. Fortunately, it only took a few, short months for the two to get up and running. And once the switch was complete, Algolia increased their productivity and performance in multiple ways, boosting the speed at which articles were indexed, as well as the site’s search results.

LeKiosk’s readers can now use Algolia’s enhanced search experience to find the information they’re looking for, whether it’s a specific article, articles on a certain topic, or an entire magazine. LeKiosk has even been experimenting with different ways to surface content to customers because they discovered that while some readers like to read something cover to cover, others like to read specific articles on a particular subject. “It’s exciting because now we can now customize the search experience and change things until we get it right,” said Marine Saffar, CTO at LeKiosk.

The result

After switching to Algolia, the publisher has been able to offer its readers a 2x faster search and discovery experience across all platforms, leading to a 3x increase in search usage! By helping readers discover new magazines and articles they were previously unfamiliar with, LeKiosk has also been able to grow their bottom line and increase subscriptions by 10 percent.

But as their team noted, it’s not just about the numbers—it’s also about creating the best customer experience possible. Their users have noticed the improvements to search, leaving positive app reviews like “Simply amazing, the last update allows to search for a specific word in the entire database, HUGE!.” 

“We’re always looking for ways to improve performance because in the end, the user needs to love the app. And we’ve discovered that Algolia is not only a box, there’s much more behind it. LeKiosk is the same—there’s much more behind the articles you read,” said Antoine Duvignacq, Communication Strategist at LeKiosk.