The demo video is really impressive. Most websites have terrible search functionality, and google's offering is pretty sucky too. This market is absolutely huge.
This is so freaking awesome. I've had this problem on nearly every website and blog I've created. Also at both of my startups (Scribd and Parse -- note: Parse uses Swiftype on our documentation pages -- try it out).
I've tried google site search (which sucked and wouldn't index all the Scribd pages for example, and it wasn't good enough for the parse documentation) and I've also used lucene and sphinx (pain to set up and the marketing folks always complained about search results, speed, ordering, relevance, etc, and analytics were a pain). Swiftype is the best option by far. I love this company -- really excited they finally have launched and I can talk about them.
Think about all the sites that use google custom site search just because that's the only decent option for them up until today. Huge market here. Congrats Swiftype.
When searching via Chrome, I kept getting a blank content area with no search results. I did some digging (thinking that the issue might be that I reject 3rd party cookies) and I found the problem:
https://swiftype.com/embed.js wasn't loading. I went to view this script in my browser and got an error which was preventing the script from executing: "The identity of this website has not been verified. Server's certificate is not trusted." I clicked "proceed" to view the script in the browser, and when I went back to the search page, it worked as intended.
On a friend's mac, opening a new page in the browser brings up the Apple homepage, and for some reason my muscle memory is such that instead of the browser's search toolbar, on that computer I sometimes click the Apple.com search field, which has a really nice expanding style effect as it gets your focus. Then I always laugh because, haha, like anyone can find anything on Apple's site.
I don't think I would try it if I wanted to get to the online store (I would Google "apple.com store") if they removed the "store" tab to make room for something else...
That is just how low my expectation of in-site search is. The status quo is abysmal!
So, I agree there is quite a bit of room for improvement here... Just remember my laughter in the 0.2 to 0.5 seconds or however long it takes for the apple.com search field to expand... :)
This has been one of the top ideas in my list of startup ideas for a while. I feel a bit bummed for not doing it, but I'm glad someone else is doing it. I should really trust my instincts more and just build things I think should exist.
Edit: I'm trying it out now, but keep getting 500 errors. You're probably getting a lot of traffic right now.
I actually did build this. With a few websites using it, but never officially launched. In hind-site I wish I had, but other things got in the way and I have no regrets.
> On top of that, Swiftype also allows site owners to pin and unpin different items to the top of their search results.
Obviously a great feature for the site owner. But I'm sure if that's a useful feature for the users. At least Google's results are objective, and wouldn't give me the page generates the most revenue as the first link.
I hear your point, but in this case, "objective" from Google means more like "random".
Google has invested heavily in relevance for their main web search, which is obviously excellent. But they've totally ignored their site search product and if you try it, you'll find that the relevance is quite poor.
Hopefully, sites will use Swiftype's controls not just to maximize short-term revenue, but to improve relevance and user experience. After all, with Google site search, Google can only use public relevance signals like inbound links to rank pages. But on your site, you have lots of internal data about which pages are most important and you can use that to steer people towards the pages they're probably looking for.
This is awesome. I wonder if they plan to use this as a vector to go after Google's market, in the long-term. Anyone at Swiftype able to comment on their long-term goals?
Very cool. The only problem I see with this is that if Swiftype is down, or slow, your website search is affected too... Depends on how you and your readers value this functionality of course. Some websites don't rely on search as badly as others do. But for basic stuff this is great.
I've checked out Swiftype, and I have to say that it is awesome. It's basically the "Stripe" of site search, in that it fixes a system that was just broken.
Hosted site search as a market has had basically zero innovation since Google launched its site search product. That was like 6 years ago.
If you've ever tried Google site search, you know how much it sucks. It's basically just a thin wrapper around a site:yourdomain.com Google search. It gives you zero control over the index (it uses the public Google index), and it's completely inappropriate for any large-scale site.
Swiftype is a perfect fit for sites that want a high-quality, customized site-search that feels like it was built from scratch. Even if you're already using Solr on your site, Swiftype can be great for creating a lightweight search engine, like for your help/documentation section.
Google would like you to believe that everyone stopped innovating when they did. There's actually a thriving market for site search but very little of it is for free. Check out SLI which has been doing cool stuff in this space for years. http://www.sli-systems.com/solutions/site-search
Looks cool, but I'm a bit reluctant to add a product to my website with an unspecified pricing model. Although: "the majority of our crawler-created search engines will remain free."
Site search was a huge distribution strategy Google used to do search. They simply worked up market until they had tons of users going to Google.com itself.
Hopefully a Wordpress plugin is in the pipeline. This would be a no-brainer any Wordpress site if setup is as simple as installing and configuring a plugin.
Matt and Quin are two of the most talented people I have had the pleasure of working with. They have so much potential as entrepreneurs. I am proud to be Swiftype investor :) Great idea and great team.
Quick feature suggestion: Can we replace/ignore specific text in the titles? I'm indexing a site with "Page title - Site Name" as the title of each search result, and manually editing 100+ pages is no fun :)
Alternately, you could compare the window title and the h1 list (or against other page titles) and automatically adjust accordingly.
Yes and yes. We do a fair amount of post-processing on the pages to handle things like boilerplate text pruning. Hopefully, it should catch what you mentioned. That said, we have bulk modification tools in the works.
I watched the video, I'm intrigued, now I want to use Swiftype -- but there is no search form on your homepage.
Searching your own site would be easiest, but I realize there isn't much content yet, so not the best demo.
What about using the logos of sites using Swiftype to activate a search form that actually takes you to their search results? "Trusted by these companies, give Swiftype a test..."
Very cool. I hope they start to explore the implications of indexing a trusted source at some point. Google ignores most metadata on your pages because for all it knows you're using that metadata to game the system. With site search that's not an issue, so the search engine could look for certain metadata on the pages it crawls, from author to importance/boost to activating keywords. The interface currently allows you to do some of this (e.g. reordering), but being able to guide the indexer from within your CMS would be even nicer.
Spot on. This is one of the real advantages to leverage in a site search system. We have only scratched the surface of what's possible, but there is a lot more to this coming soon.
At my company, in addition to having a need to index our own content, we also have a need to index content of a few other partner organizations. Does Swiftype have functionality in place to help out in this scenario?
As an example: We are foo.org but are also partnered with bar.org and baz.org. A search for "code awareness" should return a result from either of the three websites.
We do support multiple domains and even diverse types of sources (crawl and API in a single engine). Unfortunately we don't have it exposed in the interface just yet! We will get that turned on in the next day or so.
Looks great, but a small suggestion is to actually implement site search on their own site, if not only for demoing purposes. I would guess that many would love to take it for a test drive right there. Apart from that, excellent job.
I love the idea, and when I created a search engine for http://jamesshore.com, it complained that the web page doesn't exist. Ditto for http://www.jamesshore.com. Trying again colored the "Name" field red without any indication of what was happening.
After poking around a bit more, it looks like my search engine was created. But when I click it, I get an error message: "You have not created any DocumentTypes in James Shore yet. Please use the API to get started." This is despite selecting the "Crawler" option when creating the engine.
Also, deleting an engine asks me to confirm, but then doesn't actually appear to delete it.
I want to love this tool, so I'm looking forward to when these growing pains are resolved.
Edit: A third attempt appears to have worked. I'm guessing you're seeing a lot of load, and your code isn't handling timeout errors well?
73 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] threadI've tried google site search (which sucked and wouldn't index all the Scribd pages for example, and it wasn't good enough for the parse documentation) and I've also used lucene and sphinx (pain to set up and the marketing folks always complained about search results, speed, ordering, relevance, etc, and analytics were a pain). Swiftype is the best option by far. I love this company -- really excited they finally have launched and I can talk about them.
Think about all the sites that use google custom site search just because that's the only decent option for them up until today. Huge market here. Congrats Swiftype.
When searching via Chrome, I kept getting a blank content area with no search results. I did some digging (thinking that the issue might be that I reject 3rd party cookies) and I found the problem:
https://swiftype.com/embed.js wasn't loading. I went to view this script in my browser and got an error which was preventing the script from executing: "The identity of this website has not been verified. Server's certificate is not trusted." I clicked "proceed" to view the script in the browser, and when I went back to the search page, it worked as intended.
I don't think I would try it if I wanted to get to the online store (I would Google "apple.com store") if they removed the "store" tab to make room for something else...
That is just how low my expectation of in-site search is. The status quo is abysmal!
So, I agree there is quite a bit of room for improvement here... Just remember my laughter in the 0.2 to 0.5 seconds or however long it takes for the apple.com search field to expand... :)
Edit: I'm trying it out now, but keep getting 500 errors. You're probably getting a lot of traffic right now.
Obviously a great feature for the site owner. But I'm sure if that's a useful feature for the users. At least Google's results are objective, and wouldn't give me the page generates the most revenue as the first link.
Google has invested heavily in relevance for their main web search, which is obviously excellent. But they've totally ignored their site search product and if you try it, you'll find that the relevance is quite poor.
Hopefully, sites will use Swiftype's controls not just to maximize short-term revenue, but to improve relevance and user experience. After all, with Google site search, Google can only use public relevance signals like inbound links to rank pages. But on your site, you have lots of internal data about which pages are most important and you can use that to steer people towards the pages they're probably looking for.
For reference, that is what I'm currently using on my website, http://pepijndevos.nl
Hosted site search as a market has had basically zero innovation since Google launched its site search product. That was like 6 years ago.
If you've ever tried Google site search, you know how much it sucks. It's basically just a thin wrapper around a site:yourdomain.com Google search. It gives you zero control over the index (it uses the public Google index), and it's completely inappropriate for any large-scale site.
Swiftype is a perfect fit for sites that want a high-quality, customized site-search that feels like it was built from scratch. Even if you're already using Solr on your site, Swiftype can be great for creating a lightweight search engine, like for your help/documentation section.
Site search was a huge distribution strategy Google used to do search. They simply worked up market until they had tons of users going to Google.com itself.
Can't recommend Swiftype enough.
Quick feature suggestion: Can we replace/ignore specific text in the titles? I'm indexing a site with "Page title - Site Name" as the title of each search result, and manually editing 100+ pages is no fun :)
Alternately, you could compare the window title and the h1 list (or against other page titles) and automatically adjust accordingly.
I watched the video, I'm intrigued, now I want to use Swiftype -- but there is no search form on your homepage.
Searching your own site would be easiest, but I realize there isn't much content yet, so not the best demo.
What about using the logos of sites using Swiftype to activate a search form that actually takes you to their search results? "Trusted by these companies, give Swiftype a test..."
Also +1: more clarity on pricing, please.
Also, not sure if you caught this on the site yet, but we do have support for custom metadata: http://swiftype.com/documentation/meta_tags
As an example: We are foo.org but are also partnered with bar.org and baz.org. A search for "code awareness" should return a result from either of the three websites.
You have not created any DocumentTypes in ENGINE_NAME yet. Please use the API to get started.
What am I doing wrong?
Now I'm waiting to see how much this is going to cost me after you guys come out of beta! Again awesome.
After poking around a bit more, it looks like my search engine was created. But when I click it, I get an error message: "You have not created any DocumentTypes in James Shore yet. Please use the API to get started." This is despite selecting the "Crawler" option when creating the engine.
Also, deleting an engine asks me to confirm, but then doesn't actually appear to delete it.
I want to love this tool, so I'm looking forward to when these growing pains are resolved.
Edit: A third attempt appears to have worked. I'm guessing you're seeing a lot of load, and your code isn't handling timeout errors well?