Typeahead Search at Nextdoor

Typeahead Search at Nextdoor

摘要

In a thriving community, people are connected to their friends and local businesses. Nextdoor is the hyperlocal platform that mirrors these offline relationships. Every day, through active discussions on the platform, new relationships are formed and existing ones strengthened.

For example, a Nextdoor user can create a post like “I really like @XYZ cafe. @John is a hard working business owner and we should all support him by buying a cup of delicious latte!” Here, the post is created by at-mentioning (via the @ symbol) nearby businesses and users. From this post, users in the neighborhood can contribute by at-mentioning others to be part of the comment threads. As a result, John’s cafe thrives and acts as a neighborhood hub where new friends are made.

Every month, millions of these mentions are created in various discussions (including lost dogs!). In addition to posts and comments, a user can type into the search box and see, among other things, nearby users and businesses. All these features are powered by the same autocomplete service — a set of APIs to ingest data and handle typeahead search of different entity types (businesses, users, keywords etc) on Nextdoor.

This post focuses on how we built a proximity-based typeahead service to power typeahead use cases at Nextdoor.