Swiftype (YC W12) Builds Site Search That Doesn’t Suck

http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/08/swiftype-launch/

by llambda • 14 years ago

209 67 14 years ago

kennystone• 14 years ago

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.

tikhon• 14 years ago

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.

sjs3822• 14 years ago

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.

qhoxie8• 14 years ago

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

its_so_on• 14 years ago

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... :)

revorad• 14 years ago

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.

drewonstuff• 14 years ago

the question is, what is at the top of your list now?

boyter• 14 years ago

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.

yuriyg• 14 years ago

> 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.

snowmaker2• 14 years ago

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.

sjs3822• 14 years ago

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?

rytis• 14 years ago

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.

stdbrouw5• 14 years ago

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

dkl• 14 years ago

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

pepijndevos2• 14 years ago

http://tapirgo.com/

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

snowmaker2• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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

JohnGolt• 14 years ago

Ivinco Website Search (http://getwebsitesearch.com/) already one year on the market in custom search.

pepijndevos2• 14 years ago

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."

suhail• 14 years ago

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.

emmett• 14 years ago

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

Can't recommend Swiftype enough.

earl2• 14 years ago

Congrats on launching! When do I get an invite?

earl2• 14 years ago

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

kelsokennedy• 14 years ago

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?

bill-nordwall• 14 years ago

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.

qhoxie8• 14 years ago

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

trip• 14 years ago

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.

lux3• 14 years ago

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.

lux3• 14 years ago

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

qhoxie8• 14 years ago

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.

ccorda• 14 years ago

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..."

qhoxie8• 14 years ago

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

stdbrouw5• 14 years ago

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.

qhoxie8• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

stdbrouw5• 14 years ago

Ooh, thanks, I'd missed that!

knes• 14 years ago

Acquisition in Three, Two, One....

superted• 14 years ago

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.

gojomo• 14 years ago

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

junto2• 14 years ago

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?

jdlshore• 14 years ago

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?

junto2• 14 years ago

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

qhoxie8• 14 years ago

Had a couple of hiccups due to load spikes in engine creation. Working on a fix to prevent this in the future.

frankdenbow• 14 years ago

How does this differ from IndexTank?

juddlyon• 14 years ago

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.

stdbrouw5• 14 years ago

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.

stdbrouw5• 14 years ago

IndexTank is/was an indexer, this is a crawler+indexer, which means it's easier to set up as you don't have to connect it to your backend.

MikeW• 14 years ago

Does this use ElasticSearch?

e-dard• 14 years ago

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.

marknutter• 14 years ago

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.

swapsmagic• 14 years ago

Search as a service, awesome.

shadowmatter• 14 years ago

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!

Lucadg• 14 years ago

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

mriley3• 14 years ago

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

mriley3• 14 years ago

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

capex• 14 years ago

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

justinchen2• 14 years ago

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

qhoxie8• 14 years ago

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!

justinchen2• 14 years ago

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

100k• 14 years ago

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?

mriley3• 14 years ago

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

evanlong• 14 years ago

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

thomasfl• 14 years ago

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.

Swiftype (YC W12) Builds Site Search That Doesn’t Suck

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