Swiftype: The Biggest Search Engine You’ve Never Heard Of
mixergy.com
mixergy.com
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.
You can also ping our API to update a specific URL immediately, which is really helpful is cases like this.
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.
The site design could use a bit of love.
#header-banner { height: 125px; overflow: hidden; /* just for quick test */ }
#side { width: 210px; }
#main { width: 745px; }
edit: here's the result of doing that in chrome's console http://cl.ly/image/3f3D1m3s1h2U
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!
http://canadian-fury.com/2012/05/19/presenting-swiftype-inte...
http://blog.mailgun.com/post/weekly-product-update-mailgun-d...
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.
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.
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.