Limiting searches to a customer-specific part of my Magento 2 catalog?

[espen.haviken]

I am currently looking into possible search solutions for a Magento 2-based eCommerce site that we are building. We have a few thousand SKUs in the store (as the full catalog). One of the business requirements is that a customer should only see the parts of the catalog that have been made available to them through their business agreement with our company. As a result of this, one customer might have 900 SKUs available to them, while another might only have 170 SKUs available in the store after they log in.

My Algolia-related question is this; as long as I have the entire list of SKUs that the customer should be able to search for, can I limit Algolia’s search to only search this “subsection” of the whole catalog? The SKUs available are customer-specific, so entirely custom per customer, not segment-based. If you have done something like this before or have any ideas, I would love to hear suggestions or tips. Naturally, we don’t want to give search results for SKUs that the customer cannot buy.

[samuel.bodin]

Hello,

This is definitely doable and done by a lot of customers.
There is a couple of ways to do that, depending on what is easier for you:

• Secured ApiKey
  You can restrict search to a prefiltered subset of data
  This is usually the way to go, it’s made for this use case and is free to use.
  https://www.algolia.com/doc/guides/security/api-keys/how-to/how-to-restrict-the-search-to-a-subset-of-records-belonging-to-a-specific-user/

• One index/replicas per customer
  This is sometimes a good solution, this can help store the data forever and apply different rules or sorting options for each user.

Let me know if you have more questions.
Have a great day,