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

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

#41

Post by qhoxie »

robflynn wrote: post #40
qhoxie wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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.

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

#42

Post by arkitaip »

mprovost wrote: post #39
snowmaker wrote: post #10

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:yourdo…

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

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

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

#44

Post by 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?

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

#47

Post by 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.

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

#48

Post by junto »

jdlshore wrote: post #44

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 Jam…

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

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

#50

Post by 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.

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