Google and enterprise search
For nearly twenty years, Google has been the leader in innovating and improving global web search, but searching enterprise data on a public website or internal company database has always been a different challenge. For the last fourteen years, Google addressed this challenge by offering a Search Appliance, but with the recent announcement that Google will be sunsetting the Search Appliance, existing customers and prospects will now need to look elsewhere to meet their enterprise search needs.

What are the alternatives to Google Search Appliance?
There a host of alternatives to the Google Search Appliance, but they generally fall into three categories:

• Build it yourself: Use open-source software or an open-source variant to build an internal solution that replaces the Google Search Appliance.
• Legacy search solution: Use another legacy search solution from vendors who predated the Google Search Appliance.
• Switch to Swiftype: Swiftype is a modern, cloud-based enterprise search company that offers innovative technology that outperforms existing solutions.

How can Swiftype help?
Swiftype is a modern, cloud-based enterprise search company with years of experience handling enterprise level clients. With industry leading relevance technology and patented, intuitive web based control over search, our technology has been adopted by thousands of customers, including:

Over the past three years, leading brands have relied on Swiftype to power their search for four main reasons:

1. Relevance and control: Swiftype has spent years refining an advanced search algorithm that outperforms the competition. This relevance model delivers superior results upon installation, and Swiftype users retain an unprecedented level of control over their search results and relevance model through the user-friendly Swiftype dashboard.
2. Flexible, real-time indexing: Aside from Google, only Swiftype offers the option to index your content with a web crawler. This option, coupled with an already robust API and an extensive series of third-party adaptors, makes the move from GSA to Swiftype the easiest on the market. At the same time, all of these indexing options ensure that your search results are always up to date, reflecting the current state of your organization’s content.
3. Enterprise scalability: For the last four years, Swiftype has proven its ability to handle enterprise level amounts of traffic and documents, with search indexes containing hundreds of millions of documents and serving millions of queries per second. With Swiftype managing search, scale is not an issue, and your search index can grow alongside your company.
4. User-friendly dashboard: In addition to Swiftype’s core relevance and indexing technology, the Swiftype dashboard provides an intuitive interface for all team members—regardless of their technical background—to analyze and control search. From query level control over search results to technical monitoring of indexing schedules and maintenance, the Swiftype dashboard makes managing any aspect of your search experience easy.

To learn more about the power and simplicity that Swiftype can bring to your enterprise search, schedule a personalized demo with our search experts today.

A 2016 report by the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) shows an enormous trend in users wanting self-service online support for product issues over traditional support channels such as phone, email, social media, or community support. Providing an awesome user experience for self-help resources such as knowledge base articles, videos, blogs, training materials, and community forums is critical to keeping users happy. So how can companies effectively keep users from filling out a support ticket without giving off the impression that they don’t want to talk to them? Enter the case deflection strategy.

Implementing case deflection is a growing trend amongst companies that offer a self-service support experience. The goal is to provide the user with the answers they are looking for before they decide to file a time-consuming support ticket. In this pursuit, the search box is a critical component. If implemented correctly, great search will ensure that users have a much easier time finding the answers they need. Here are 3 examples of companies that deliver a great knowledge base search experience.

HubSpot Academy—HubSpot’s search box is prominent and prompts users to search with the phrase “Search our docs and learning resources” . The autocomplete experience is fast and includes many types of content (quick answers, sales guides and video trainings to name a few). The results page also does a nice job of giving users the chance to filter to all content types and this page also tells users when the content was last updated.

Chartboost—Chartboost’s knowledge base search experience is front and center at the top of the page. Their search bar uses has a creative animation showing example questions to ask. When the user does begin their search, their autocomplete experience begins after the third character. Finally, their results are delivered fast.

SurveyMonkey—SurveyMonkey’s help center allows you to browse by topic or type in your query with a search bar. When using the search bar, a drop down menu pops up and you can click on links or the list of topics to be redirected to article topics and summaries. The footer also includes a choice of multiple languages to help in the search.

Across all three examples, search is prominent, friendly, and most importantly, effective, making it easy for users to find the content they need. To see more examples of companies with great search across their help centers, check out our case studies.