
Swiftype (YC W12) Builds Site Search That Doesn’t Suck - llambda
http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/08/swiftype-launch/
======
snowmaker
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.

~~~
mprovost
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>

~~~
arkitaip
More likely all the low hanging fruits are gone and further improvements in
web search requires some serious resources.

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tikhon
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.

~~~
sjs382
I tested the Parse.com documentation
(<https://www.parse.com/docs/search#stq=xcode>) and found some problems with
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.

~~~
qhoxie
We're looking into this. I'll try to reproduce it and get it fixed shortly.
Thanks!

~~~
niels
If it's not to late, I would move the embed script to a subdomain so you can
host the script from where ever you like (cdn or other host).

------
stdbrouw
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.

Also +1: more clarity on pricing, please.

~~~
qhoxie
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.

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>

~~~
robflynn
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.

~~~
qhoxie
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.

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shadowmatter
I love the idea, and I think there is a huge, ignored opportunity here. But
relevance is what makes or breaks search engines, and dabbling with a search
engine I made for Joel on Software (like in the example video), I think you
should work on tuning your scoring function.

Searching for "about me" (with quotes) returns the "Distributed Version
Control is here to stay, baby" article at
<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2010/03/17.html> first, and
<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/AboutMe.html> second. While it's pretty stupid
that the "About Joel Spolsky" text is in a <div> tag versus a <hX> tag, maybe
you could weight the title more, because likely people will be using Swiftype
to search curated corporate sites that are typically less spammy than the
general Internet.

Anyway, great job so far, and I'm very excited to see this and where this
could lead!

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jdlshore
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?

~~~
junto
I had the same experience. I can't delete them either. I tried in Chrome and
even IE. My last attempt in IE worked.

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pepijndevos
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."

------
e-dard
We use SearchSpring. Does anyone know if this is an advantage over than?
Currently, with SearchSpring we can:

\- specify result rankings;

\- add facets to our products and then SS allows the customer to do things
like compare products, restrict to over $$, or only white, grey and red;

\- does fuzzy completions etc.

I ask because while the product we use is OK, it doesn't have a great API, and
I want to be able to integrate more tightly with the service and allow myself
to do things like A/B tests, dynamic results, customer specific rankings etc.

------
kennystone
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.

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lux
Congrats, this looks fantastic!

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.

~~~
lux
Another quick suggestion: Show a tally of how many pages have been indexed in
the admin panel. Cheers!

~~~
qhoxie
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.

~~~
lux
Awesome!

------
emmett
We use Swiftype at TwitchTV and it's amazing. Great technology, easy to
integrate, simple APIs.

Can't recommend Swiftype enough.

------
marknutter
I'm beginning to think a good way to find startup ideas is to pick through the
mess Google has left behind with its labs and different free tools out there
and actually make a go of creating a business around them. The problem with
all these free Google offerings is that they scare away potential startups but
aren't really run like businesses so it doesn't matter if they actually solve
the problem well or not. Swiftype is a great example of a startup doing pretty
much exactly that. I can guarantee the average response to their idea was
"well, why not just use Google search."

I can think of a few Google tools that could be done way better if a startup
put a lot of effort into solving the problem better, like Google Groups which
is nigh unusable due to spam and a crappy interface.

------
rytis
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.

~~~
stdbrouw
If your own site is down then your site search is down too, isn't it?

~~~
dkl
My website can be up but swiftype be down. That's what the parent was talking
about.

------
gojomo
Any chance Swiftype might get equal billing with HNSearch as the 'official'
site search of HN?

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superted
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.

------
suhail
I am impressed guys - great job so far.

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.

------
sjs382
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?

------
yuriyg
> 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.

~~~
snowmaker
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.

------
junto
After clicking Create Engine I get a 404. Returning to the home screen I see
the new engine listed, but when I click on it I just see the message:

You have not created any DocumentTypes in ENGINE_NAME yet. Please use the API
to get started.

What am I doing wrong?

~~~
junto
This issue is now fixed. At last I have a search that works on my Tumblr blog:
<http://www.benpowell.co.uk>.

Now I'm waiting to see how much this is going to cost me after you guys come
out of beta! Again awesome.

------
trip
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.

------
bill-nordwall
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.

~~~
qhoxie
There is! It is functional already, just a little more testing before we
release it.

------
ccorda
One design suggestion:

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..."

~~~
qhoxie
Both of those are great suggestions. We'll likely make those changes soon.
Thanks for the thoughts!

------
revorad
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.

~~~
boyter
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.

------
100k
I'm really excited about this because it's a great idea that meets a huge
need.

Quick feedback: while the demo video plays, the screenshot slideshow
continues. In my browser, this was just beneath the bottom left of the video
and was really distracting. Could you pause the slideshow when the video popup
is displayed?

~~~
mriley
Good catch. I'll make that change right now.

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frankdenbow
How does this differ from IndexTank?

~~~
juddlyon
That's what I thought. IndexTank was purchased by LinkedIn and open-sourced
their engine it appears.

This looks really cool, kudos to the guys that built it. One thing that's
worth pointing out:

Google Site Search and Google Custom Search are two different things. The
former is free and a "wrapper" as was noted, the latter is incredibly powerful
and easy to implement/tune.

That said, I'd rather give my money to these guys assuming they have a sane
pricing model.

~~~
stdbrouw
Google Custom Search is pretty powerful indeed, but I wouldn't call it easy.
The docs are pretty dense and you need to tweak all sorts of XML documents
even for simple stuff like best bets.

------
justinchen
Will there be support for location-aware searches so we can index/search by
geo lat/long?

~~~
qhoxie
Definitely. Swiftype currently supports geo-based searching/filtering, but it
appears we haven't pushed out the docs for it yet. They will be up soon!

~~~
justinchen
Awesome! Can't wait to give it a spin.

------
MikeW
Does this use ElasticSearch?

------
pepijndevos
<http://tapirgo.com/>

For reference, that is what I'm currently using on my website,
<http://pepijndevos.nl>

------
kelsokennedy
Wow, this is really impressive! Great timing with the google site search
changes. I just wonder what the price will be like after beta is finished?

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thomasfl
Using simple drag and drop to adjust search rank is brilliant, and the minimal
design seems to follow all of Dieter Rams' 10 rules for good design.

------
Lucadg
in <http://swiftype.com/engines/bca/document_types/new> I click on Delete This
Engine, click OK on "Are you sure? This action is permanent." and the engine
is still there. Am I missing something? Engine Key: f1EwCDo3g9qCmJsmNnGC

~~~
mriley
We're working on a fix for this right now. Thanks for the heads up!

~~~
mriley
And just pushed the fix. Please let us know if you see it again!
support@swiftype.com

------
capex
Why don't you give a quick demo of your product by providing a site search box
on your own site?

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knes
Acquisition in Three, Two, One....

------
evanlong
I LOVE YOU MATT RILEY... AND QUIN... GO TEXAS A&M

------
swapsmagic
Search as a service, awesome.

------
earl
Congrats on launching! When do I get an invite?

~~~
earl
nm it's open to all. I'm planning on learning to read any time now.

