4 ms·

Swiftype: The Biggest Search Engine You’ve Never Heard Of

64 points by 100k 13y ago

twakefield 13y ago
Swiftype is one of those products that is so easy to implement, you'll think you missed a few steps. It improved the search on our docs immensely in a few minutes. I also really like the ability to easily customize results. As a bonus, we've found an unexpected benefit of getting a feedback loop on how to improve our docs by getting a list of the most popular searches and those that have not returned results. It quickly shows us where we have holes in our documentation.
polarix 13y ago
I actually can't tell which parts of that page are ads and which are the real content.
- ape4 13y ago
  That page feels very spammy.
  - AndrewWarner 13y ago
    Why? What part of my site feels spammy?
    - pinwale 13y ago
      I think it's all the embedded content and the huge banner (that somewhat unrelated to the headline) at the top, etc is not really meshing together. The site design could use a bit of love.
    - mh- 13y ago
      masthead/call to action is too tall (occupies too much of the above-the-fold on my laptop) #header-banner { height: 125px; overflow: hidden; /* just for quick test */ } sidebar is too wide, relative to the width of the content. #side { width: 210px; } #main { width: 745px; } these adjustments obviously require other adjustments, but try them out to see how it feels less claustrophobic. edit: here's the result of doing that in chrome's console http://cl.ly/image/3f3D1m3s1h2U http://cl.ly/image/3f3D1m3s1h2U
    - vorporeal 13y ago
      The primary issue is that the design is very obviously driven by the goal of monetization. On my laptop, the top half of the page is dominated by the navigation bar at the top (starting with "Premium Membership") and the "Learn From Proven Entrepreneurs" box, featuring a giant "Go Premium?" button, which ends up being right in the middle of the page. I'd estimate that <20% of the space above the fold is useful content. In addition, there are a number of polish issues that exacerbate the spammy feeling caused by what I described above. There's an escaping bug in the title of the login widget on the right side ("YOU\'RE LOGGED OUT"). You use a number of different background colors (the search widget has a blue one, the "What's new here" has an off-white one). There are too many groups of social media buttons (on the left of the main container, under the search box, under the video clip). There are a lot of horizontal and vertical separators, and they have differing styles and amounts of padding. Hope that helps!
- tincholio 13y ago
  I got the same feeling from a couple of comments in this thread
  - freehunter 13y ago
    That's the way I feel every time I step into a HN thread about either a company being bought out or a company making their debut on HN. The almost instant responses of glowing reviews and praise for the service seem suspicious, but I have no way of knowing if the product/service really is that good or if the product/service has some dedicated fans commenting for them. It really is hard to tell the difference. I get accusations that I must work for Microsoft all the time because I'm one of the few people who don't hate everything they do. Since I'm well aware of the false positive rate for calling out paid comments, I tend to just not say anything even when I'm suspicious of another commenter. It is possible to just truly like the product/service being talked about.
    - 100k 13y ago
      For the record, both of the people who have praised Swiftype in this thread are actual Swiftype customers, and both of them have written about Swiftype on their own sites (without prompting from us). http://canadian-fury.com/2012/05/19/presenting-swiftype-integration-and-an-explanation-of-how-to-do-it/ http://canadian-fury.com/2012/05/19/presenting-swiftype-inte... http://blog.mailgun.com/post/weekly-product-update-mailgun-default-smtp-config-for-rackspace-managed-cloud-plus-better-search-on-docs/ http://blog.mailgun.com/post/weekly-product-update-mailgun-d...
- AndrewWarner 13y ago
  What can I do to make it clearer? Got any suggestions? I mentioned 3 sponsors in that interview: Walker Corporate Law, Grasshopper & Shopify Swiftype is not a sponsor. I've never gotten any money from them.
  - polarix 13y ago
    Okay, looking at this again, it's clear that the video/transcript has the good stuff. However: 1. the top banner is too big 2. between it, and the talk of free/premium, and the hype-sounding stuff in the short intro, somehow this pattern-matches to scammy sites for me, and without watching the video I'm expecting it to be minute after minute of buildup with contentless up-selling. 3. Having the transcript in a scrolling box makes it harder to notice that it's actually a representation of what I want, especially when: 4. Leading with the sponsors is really tough. I expect to see sponsors at the end, after I'm appreciative of what the content was. Seeing them at the beginning just annoys me and makes me feel like they're in the way of what I'm trying to do. Since the earlier hooks triggered negative heuristics for me, I didn't power through, and never got to the good stuff. Hope that's more constructive.
shocks 13y ago
The real link is here: https://swiftype.com/ https://swiftype.com/
dljsjr 13y ago
Swiftype is fantastic. I've been using their service to power search on my Octopress blog since last May when they were still in Beta, and I've loved every moment of it. Their REST API is also fantastic; I've modified my deploy Octopress rake task to automatically hit the endpoint that requests a recrawl of my site so that the results are always up to date. At first I felt a little dirty doing it, but I engaged them on Twitter (this was last year when I first implemented it, too lazy to find the records) and they actually encouraged it. A great team, and a really awesome product.
- gcb0 13y ago
  Their pricing plan only list on demand crawl at the top tier... i assume you have a very big blog?
  - dljsjr 13y ago
    I don't, now that you mention that it's entirely possible that my crawling scheme doesn't work anymore. The beta was 100% free and I didn't pay much attention to what changed when the beta ended.
    - qhoxie 13y ago
      We still allow this. You are just more limited in how frequently you can do an on-demand crawl with the free plan versus a paid plan. You can also ping our API to update a specific URL immediately, which is really helpful is cases like this.
wicknicks 13y ago
Swiftype is a site search engine. The title makes it sound more like a generic web search engine.
- AndrewWarner 13y ago
  That's right. I didn't mean to imply otherwise.
jhonovich 13y ago
We pay $79 a month for swiftype. We use it for our site search, using the developer API. The big thing for us is that we have member's only content and we want to ensure what exactly is indexed and what is not. This was an issue with using Google site search especially since the rankings would get skewed by Google including words in our site template. We've also added in custom filters like searching by author, date, category, etc. If I remember correctly, we paid about $1000 a year to Google for our site search before this, so the money is about even but the overall search quality, accuracy and options have gone up.

64 points by 100k 13y ago

Swiftype is one of those products that is so easy to implement, you'll think you missed a few steps. It improved the search on our docs immensely in a few minutes. I also really like the ability to easily customize results. As a bonus, we've found an unexpected benefit of getting a feedback loop on how to improve our docs by getting a list of the most popular searches and those that have not returned results. It quickly shows us where we have holes in our documentation.

polarix 13y ago

I actually can't tell which parts of that page are ads and which are the real content.

ape4 13y ago
That page feels very spammy.
- AndrewWarner 13y ago
  Why? What part of my site feels spammy?
  - pinwale 13y ago
    I think it's all the embedded content and the huge banner (that somewhat unrelated to the headline) at the top, etc is not really meshing together. The site design could use a bit of love.
  - mh- 13y ago
    masthead/call to action is too tall (occupies too much of the above-the-fold on my laptop) #header-banner { height: 125px; overflow: hidden; /* just for quick test */ } sidebar is too wide, relative to the width of the content. #side { width: 210px; } #main { width: 745px; } these adjustments obviously require other adjustments, but try them out to see how it feels less claustrophobic. edit: here's the result of doing that in chrome's console http://cl.ly/image/3f3D1m3s1h2U http://cl.ly/image/3f3D1m3s1h2U
  - vorporeal 13y ago
    The primary issue is that the design is very obviously driven by the goal of monetization. On my laptop, the top half of the page is dominated by the navigation bar at the top (starting with "Premium Membership") and the "Learn From Proven Entrepreneurs" box, featuring a giant "Go Premium?" button, which ends up being right in the middle of the page. I'd estimate that <20% of the space above the fold is useful content. In addition, there are a number of polish issues that exacerbate the spammy feeling caused by what I described above. There's an escaping bug in the title of the login widget on the right side ("YOU\'RE LOGGED OUT"). You use a number of different background colors (the search widget has a blue one, the "What's new here" has an off-white one). There are too many groups of social media buttons (on the left of the main container, under the search box, under the video clip). There are a lot of horizontal and vertical separators, and they have differing styles and amounts of padding. Hope that helps!
tincholio 13y ago
I got the same feeling from a couple of comments in this thread
- freehunter 13y ago
  That's the way I feel every time I step into a HN thread about either a company being bought out or a company making their debut on HN. The almost instant responses of glowing reviews and praise for the service seem suspicious, but I have no way of knowing if the product/service really is that good or if the product/service has some dedicated fans commenting for them. It really is hard to tell the difference. I get accusations that I must work for Microsoft all the time because I'm one of the few people who don't hate everything they do. Since I'm well aware of the false positive rate for calling out paid comments, I tend to just not say anything even when I'm suspicious of another commenter. It is possible to just truly like the product/service being talked about.
  - 100k 13y ago
    For the record, both of the people who have praised Swiftype in this thread are actual Swiftype customers, and both of them have written about Swiftype on their own sites (without prompting from us). http://canadian-fury.com/2012/05/19/presenting-swiftype-integration-and-an-explanation-of-how-to-do-it/ http://canadian-fury.com/2012/05/19/presenting-swiftype-inte... http://blog.mailgun.com/post/weekly-product-update-mailgun-default-smtp-config-for-rackspace-managed-cloud-plus-better-search-on-docs/ http://blog.mailgun.com/post/weekly-product-update-mailgun-d...
AndrewWarner 13y ago
What can I do to make it clearer? Got any suggestions? I mentioned 3 sponsors in that interview: Walker Corporate Law, Grasshopper & Shopify Swiftype is not a sponsor. I've never gotten any money from them.
- polarix 13y ago
  Okay, looking at this again, it's clear that the video/transcript has the good stuff. However: 1. the top banner is too big 2. between it, and the talk of free/premium, and the hype-sounding stuff in the short intro, somehow this pattern-matches to scammy sites for me, and without watching the video I'm expecting it to be minute after minute of buildup with contentless up-selling. 3. Having the transcript in a scrolling box makes it harder to notice that it's actually a representation of what I want, especially when: 4. Leading with the sponsors is really tough. I expect to see sponsors at the end, after I'm appreciative of what the content was. Seeing them at the beginning just annoys me and makes me feel like they're in the way of what I'm trying to do. Since the earlier hooks triggered negative heuristics for me, I didn't power through, and never got to the good stuff. Hope that's more constructive.

shocks 13y ago

The real link is here: https://swiftype.com/ https://swiftype.com/

dljsjr 13y ago

Swiftype is fantastic. I've been using their service to power search on my Octopress blog since last May when they were still in Beta, and I've loved every moment of it. Their REST API is also fantastic; I've modified my deploy Octopress rake task to automatically hit the endpoint that requests a recrawl of my site so that the results are always up to date. At first I felt a little dirty doing it, but I engaged them on Twitter (this was last year when I first implemented it, too lazy to find the records) and they actually encouraged it. A great team, and a really awesome product.

gcb0 13y ago
Their pricing plan only list on demand crawl at the top tier... i assume you have a very big blog?
- dljsjr 13y ago
  I don't, now that you mention that it's entirely possible that my crawling scheme doesn't work anymore. The beta was 100% free and I didn't pay much attention to what changed when the beta ended.
  - qhoxie 13y ago
    We still allow this. You are just more limited in how frequently you can do an on-demand crawl with the free plan versus a paid plan. You can also ping our API to update a specific URL immediately, which is really helpful is cases like this.

wicknicks 13y ago

Swiftype is a site search engine. The title makes it sound more like a generic web search engine.

AndrewWarner 13y ago
That's right. I didn't mean to imply otherwise.

jhonovich 13y ago

We pay $79 a month for swiftype. We use it for our site search, using the developer API. The big thing for us is that we have member's only content and we want to ensure what exactly is indexed and what is not. This was an issue with using Google site search especially since the rankings would get skewed by Google including words in our site template. We've also added in custom filters like searching by author, date, category, etc. If I remember correctly, we paid about $1000 a year to Google for our site search before this, so the money is about even but the overall search quality, accuracy and options have gone up.