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

#1

Post by llambda » Tue, May 08, 2012, 5:19 PM UTC

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

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

#2

Post by kennystone » Tue, May 08, 2012, 5:40 PM UTC

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.

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

#3

Post by tikhon » Tue, May 08, 2012, 5:45 PM UTC

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.

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

#4

Post by revorad » Tue, May 08, 2012, 5:58 PM UTC

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.

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

#5

Post by yuriyg » Tue, May 08, 2012, 5:58 PM UTC

> 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.

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

#6

Post by sjs382 » Tue, May 08, 2012, 5:59 PM UTC

tikhon wrote: post #3

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…

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.

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

#7

Post by sjs382 » Tue, May 08, 2012, 6:02 PM UTC

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?

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

#8

Post by rytis » Tue, May 08, 2012, 6:03 PM UTC

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.

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

#9

Post by pepijndevos » Tue, May 08, 2012, 6:03 PM UTC

http://tapirgo.com/

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

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

#10

Post by snowmaker » Tue, May 08, 2012, 6:04 PM UTC

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.