Reddinx: Search your favorite subreddit with Algolia - Tim Carry, Doctolib

About this Video

• Video Title: Reddinx: Search your favorite subreddit with Algolia - Tim Carry, Doctolib
• Channel: Algolia
• Speakers: Tim Carry
• Duration: 00:16:33

Introduction

Tim Carry, a full-stack engineer at Doctolib and former Algolia developer advocate, presents Reddinx, a side project that indexes Reddit subreddits into Algolia for improved searchability. He focuses on his experience using Reddinx to search a subreddit of user-generated maps for his Dungeons & Dragons game.

Key Takeaways

• Reddinx improves Reddit's search functionality by indexing subreddits into Algolia, offering faster search, typo tolerance, and better visual presentation of results (e.g., image thumbnails).
• The project leverages the Reddit API and Pushshift API to gather comprehensive data, addressing limitations of the Reddit API's recency constraints. Data is structured by year, month, and individual posts for efficient indexing.
• Reddinx's data freshness is managed using a CircleCI job that updates the index daily with the past 24 hours' posts, with a seven-day rolling window for data retention.
• The user interface is inspired by Pinterest, employing an infinite scroll and CSS grids for a masonry-style layout, maximizing visual appeal and information density.
• Reddinx's core functionality for fetching and transforming Reddit data is packaged as an npm module called ratings for broader use.