The Swiftype Search platform attempts to make adding search to your website simple. It will automatically crawl your data and index it into a hosted search engine, use intuitive algorithmic controls to fine-tune your search, and access real-time analytics that give you the information you need to improve the search experience and respond to emerging trends.
Swiftype Acquisition
Swiftype search was acquired by Elastic in November 2017. Elastic powers Elasticsearch, a tool Swiftype used previously to index and store their search content. While the acquisition didn’t provide any drastic changes, they did set a new introductory price and work to incorporate some of Elastic’s search features into their Enterprise Search.
Elastic Swiftype
Following the acquisition, Swiftype search did not undergo any major changes other than a few pricing changes and the addition of the Swiftype app search. This is a product similar to the Swiftype search but aimed more towards developers making mobile and web applications. Another change that came along is the integration of the Elastic stack with Swiftype.
Swiftype App Search
In addition to site search, the Swiftype search also supports apps via API. This part is mainly directed towards developers and comes with a learning curve and associated expenses. It comes with an app search dashboard to issue your first queries, and quickly implement search within your application with one of the numerous available API clients.
Swiftype Search Box
FEATURES-
- Fully managed: We secure, store, and search all of your documents in the cloud. Your site stays fast.
- No programming required: Works with your theme’s existing search.php template. Drop in the Site Search plugin and it just works.
- Out of the box relevance: Pre-optimized typo tolerance, bigram matching, stemming, synonyms, phrase matching, and more.
- Automatic Updating: Search results automatically synchronize when you save, delete, or change website content.
- Intuitive Dashboard: Use slick and powerful dashboard tools to customize your search relevance.
- Deep Insights: Impactful search analytics help you understand your users and guide you to productive actions.
- Choose Your Language: Supports 13 languages, including English, French, German, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Universal, and more.
Swiftype Subscription
Swiftype search follows a SaaS business plan. They give both monthly and yearly subscriptions based on the number of pages indexed and have a limit on the search queries. The costlier plans give access to more premium features.
Swiftype Plans
Alternative Site Search and Pricing
Expertrec is a site search solution for websites that begin at 9 USD per month. It gives the same performance and feature set as Swiftype search at a much more affordable price. It lacks the backing of the Elastic stack but this makes little difference to owners of websites. The elastic stack adds value only to large conglomerates.
Here we will visit the steps required to add the ExpertRec Custom search engine to your website. This is one of the easiest setup processes of all the available options out there and is highly recommended.
- Navigate to https://cse.expertrec.com/newuser?platform=cse and signup with your Google ID.
- Enter your website’s URL when prompted. You can select a server location near you and add the URL of your sitemap if you wish to. These will be auto-detected otherwise.
- You can play around with the settings and customize the UI as the crawl runs. Once it is complete, you can check out a fully functional demo before taking the search to your website.
- You can take the search to your website with little to no effort. All you need to do is to paste the code snippet available on the dashboard on your website.
ExpertRec comes with more customization options that you can explore. You can read this article to find a more detailed guide on the installation and configuration.
