Today we are excited to announce a new dashboard feature for site owners with crawler based engines: the Live Index Preview tool. Some of you may have noticed this feature since we rolled it out a month ago, but we announce it today in conjunction with our new meta tags tutorial, which walks site owners through the steps required to implement Swiftype meta tags on your website template.

Now when you log into your Swiftype account and visit the Content tab, you have the ability to compare the live state of your site’s content with what Swiftype presently has indexed for your search engine. To do this, click on the Details button for a page document from your main Content tab view, or look up a specific URL from the search box.

On the Details page, switch from the indexed page overview to the live view by clicking on the bolt icon. Once you switch to live view, you can see what Swiftype currently has indexed in the left column, side by side with your live site offerings in the right column.

Why is this tool useful? This tool allows site owners to make changes to their site (modifying content or adding custom meta tags) and immediately see how their index will change during the next recrawl. Furthermore, from the Options drop down it’s possible to trigger instant recrawls of specific pages.

The Live Index Preview enables a much greater degree of flexibility when making changes to your website, allowing you to immediately see the impact of those changes in your search engine index without having to wait for a Swiftype recrawl to take place. To view our new meta tags tutorial, click on the link below.