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ICO Alert is the only comprehensive calendar of upcoming ICO's. An ICO is an Initial Coin Offering. An Initial Coin Offering is a new means for start-ups to raise money and attract early adopters using blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies.

ICO Alert is a directory of ICO's. As such, it's a keyword searchable database. For a site like ICO Alert, search is the first and last feature to perfect in order to best serve the user base.

A previous developer had wisely moved the site from its initial WordPress platform to Craft CMS. This made the site much more secure, easy to update, extensible and scalable. However, the search functionality, which was the principle feature of the site, was not fast enough. Solspace was called in to help speed things up. Our initial attempts to patch the problem relied on proxy caching methods such as those available through CloudFlare. This form of caching helped quite a bit, but the number of search keyword permutations quickly rendered simple proxy caching approaches unscalable.

We had developed some search solutions for other clients using Algolia. These had been on ExpressionEngine. This time we had the opportunity to unify Craft's killer user interface and ease of use with Algolia's super fast live search capabilities. We developed a Craft CMS plugin that would respond to Craft publishing events by pushing content into individual Algolia indexes that we had established. Then we developed several flavors of Algolia InstantSearch to support the different modes of live search on ICO Alert. Now, as you type, the page instantly adjusts to filter ICO's by your keyword. Each keystroke hits the Algolia service, but you would never know it. The speed is so fast you feel like you are just typing and getting results from your own machine.

With ours and Algolia's help, ICO Alert has gone on to continued growth and expansion, serving as a leader in the emerging market of cryptocurrencies and blockchain tech.