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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

#51

Post by qhoxie »

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…

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

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

#53

Post by shadowmatter »

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 tag versus a 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!

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

#54

Post by stdbrouw »

qhoxie wrote: post #34
stdbrouw wrote: post #33

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 yo…

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

Ooh, thanks, I'd missed that!

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

#55

Post by drewonstuff »

revorad wrote: post #4

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.

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

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

#56

Post by juddlyon »

frankdenbow wrote: post #45

How does this differ from IndexTank?

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.

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

#58

Post by stdbrouw »

juddlyon wrote: post #56
frankdenbow wrote: post #45

How does this differ from IndexTank?

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…

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.

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

#59

Post by dkl »

stdbrouw wrote: post #32
rytis wrote: post #8

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.

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

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

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

#60

Post by boyter »

revorad wrote: post #4

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.

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.
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