Site Search Should Be Sexy: How Swiftype Raised $1.7M | Hacker News Reader

Site Search Should Be Sexy: How Swiftype Raised $1.7M

forbes.com

67 pointsqhoxie17 comments

Swiftype was one of the sleepers. They'd been growing really fast but were known mostly to their users rather than to the people who talk about startups. There are quite a few of these.

Could you give another example of one of these? How do you find them?

Interesting. I wonder if Swiftype uses Apache Lucene/Solr/Nutch as backend.

Facebook is listed as Client. They have a contract with Microsoft (Bing) and have at least two internal search engines. One of them is the type-ahead one as explained there:

https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=369584442130

https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=389105248919

I assume FB uses Swiftype not for the main FB website, maybe the developer documentation or some PR sites. (They use(d) even some SharePoint sites for business pages).

EDIT: Yes, Swiftype is based on Lucene et al: http://www.quora.com/Swiftype/What-is-the-technology-stack-b...

There's a recent interview with Swiftype founder Quin Hoxie up on Mixergy which is worth a watch. http://mixergy.com/quin-hoxie-swiftype-interview/

I swear Hacker News is inside my head. I was JUST investigating server-less (from my side) full text search engines like this over the last week. I checked out lunr.js, google custom search engine, sqlite, and a few other options. This looks great and I think this might be what I implement. Thanks!

(I work for Swiftype.)

Great to hear! Be sure to let us know if you run into problems or have suggestions. support@swiftype.com goes to the whole team.

Warning: link contains really weird and annoying 'splash screen advert'. (Can we get a proper warning for URLs that abuse expectations?)

The article was from Forbes. That's all the warning you need.

I kinda anticipated this response. My only defence is that I find it difficult to maintain a 'domain -> crappy-annoying-behaviour' map in my head, but it's a fair point ;)

Just signed up. Was looking for something like this a few weeks ago. Seems to be exactly what I need. :)

"while basic site search is simple (think adding a Google GOOG -1.13% site search toolbar to the top of your blog), good, effective site search is very, very hard"

What does the above statement mean? AND Why doesn't swiftype come up in techcrunch's autocomplete search?

There are many factors that make high quality search difficult, but as an example, take relevance that evolves over time. Static text-based rankings are a fine start, but improving search relevance continuously based on usage takes a lot of data. Even when you have the data, leveraging it requires careful tuning to prevent issues like over-training. This is just one of the things we do for people out of the box.

"improving search relevance continuously based on usage takes a lot of data."

Is this usage based on where a user clicks after searching or based on actually studying usage of the site independent of your search results?

Both – interaction with the search results and general site usage data are important factors.

ok, so you guys track the clickstream & optimize for clicks that don't help the user. At a per site level i can see where the bottlenecks come in, but business must be good if those are your problems. Congrats!

source link?

https://swiftype.com

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