Last Updated: November 21, 2017

Google directing customers to the ad-supported Custom Search Engine

By now you’ve probably heard that Google plans to sunset Google Site Search (GSS) and direct existing customers to use their free replacement, the Google Custom Search Engine (CSE). Unfortunately for these customers, the CSE forces websites to show ads alongside their search results, so the transition isn’t as simple as it may seem. As the dominant alternative to GSS for the past 4 years, we at Swiftype are very familiar with the migration process, and we’re happy to share some of our advice to those weighing their options.

How does this impact your site search performance and site visitor experience?

Companies who choose to stay with Google and its CSE will be sacrificing the end user experience. A few sources have already noted that the changes are “unlikely to be well-received by web users who are already sick of being inundated with ads.” But perhaps even worse than the degraded user experience is the fact that users who click those ads will leave your website, which is the opposite of the goal of the Site Search feature. It’s hard to imagine how any business could justify using a Site Search product that invites their users to leave their website entirely.

A good Site Search implementation helps users find the content they’re looking for and keeps them engaged and active on your website. Not only is this a better user experience, but it is also a rich source of valuable user analytics for website owners. Swiftype was designed specifically to help our customers capitalize on this opportunity. We offer a completely ad-free experience as well as detailed analytics that can illuminate important customer behavior.

What you can expect from alternatives

As a website owner, alternative solutions for Site Search can generally be grouped into two buckets: free plugins and paid SaaS solutions.

The obvious advantage of free alternatives is the price tag, but the disadvantages cannot be dismissed. The main issues to consider are:

• These options are highly unlikely to be cloud-based solutions, which has far reaching consequences when it comes to both the cost of maintenance and the quality of search results. Cloud-based solutions eliminate the maintenance burden for the website owner and also offer much better search relevance algorithms.
• Free solutions are also unlikely to provide general customer service, so if you desire a level of customization, you will likely need to learn to do that on your own.  Your search provider will not be involved in helping you create a good end user experience.
• Poor scalability — because free plugins are often just built on top of complex database queries, they don’t typically scale for sites with a significant amount of traffic.

Swiftype and its modern cloud-based search technology offers a more robust alternative:

• You’ll get all the bells and whistles — best-in-class search relevance algorithms, powerful analytics, and all the modern user-facing features your users have come to expect: autocomplete, faceted search, spelling correction, typo tolerance, etc.
• Built for scale — hosted solutions can scale to millions of search requests per day without impacting the speed of the rest of your website.
• Extensive customization options built to integrate with modern web technology and a direct contact for customer support requests.
• When you’re purchasing from established companies that have helped thousands of organizations implement search, you can be confident in the product you’re buying

Why is Google sunsetting their hosted search product?

GSS has been a fixture of the Internet for over a decade now, and part of its initial appeal was the simple, self-service nature of the product. Unfortunately, consumer expectations of search have far outpaced the feature set that GSS and CSE offered — ironically, due in large part to advances that Google made exclusively in their consumer-facing internet search engine. Add to this the fact that great customer support is an absolute requirement for effectively integrating site search into the widely varying user experiences of each different website, and it’s not hard to see why Google is moving on from their product.

Getting started with Swiftype Site Search – The leading GSS Alternative

Today, Swiftype is the trusted search provider for companies like Lyft, Cloudflare, Twilio, AT&T, Qualcomm, and Shopify. To get started with Swiftype, you just enter your website’s address and Swiftype will index your site and create your search engine in real-time. No coding is required, but developers can use the API for extra control. Swiftype can index any amount of content and new content is indexed automatically, so your search is always up-to-date.

A free trial makes trying Swiftype risk free

Want to try out Swiftype Site Search for your website? You can sign up for a free trial here.

Two weeks ago, we launched Swiftype Enterprise Search to revolutionize the way employees find content across their data sources. Today, we’re excited to announce another advancement in helping workers quickly find the right information: our just-released Salesforce AppExchange app.

Why the AppExchange? Because Salesforce isn’t just the world’s #1 CRM platform; they’ve helped more than 150,000 companies grow every part of their business from the cloud. They pioneered the concept of cloud-based business applications and, in the process, have fundamentally changed how companies view and use technology.

The cloud is now where business takes place. It’s where your data resides and where your applications live. And, it’s why we built Swiftype Enterprise Search for Salesforce to help your workers find information across all Salesforce Clouds: Sales, Service, and Communities.

Swiftype for Salesforce helps sales, service and support, managers, and even customers quickly find the right information, right now. Here are a few examples of how Swiftype can help your teams today:

• Swiftype helps sales teams be more productive in their jobs as they work with prospects and customers by presenting information related to their accounts before they’ve even searched for it.
• Swiftype helps service and support teams with case deflection by presenting related information to help solve cases faster so they’re not wasting time hunting for or recreating information.
• Swiftype helps customers find answers before they think of opening a case by connecting content from Communities, Salesforce’s KnowledgeBase, and your company’s internal content repository.  
  

Best of all, Swiftype isn’t just limited to Salesforce. Our app indexes content across any cloud data source—from Salesforce Clouds to Dropbox to Google Apps and more—and delivers results in a single search experience. And, it takes just days to roll out Swiftype, with no IT development resources needed.

Swiftype for Salesforce also gives you all of the advanced features you’d expect from a leading enterprise search application. Search results are predicted and delivered based on a user’s role, permissions, search behavior, and preferred data sources and objects. Administrators can customize results based on tools and filters. Our dashboard lets you easily monitor and customize the search experience without any technical skills.  Swiftype Analytics help you understand what your employees and customers are searching for and how to make them more productive. And there’s so much more!

Come find us in the AppExchange and learn why those who’ve tried us love us!

On Valentine’s Day, it’s easy to be bitter if you can’t find what you’re looking for.

Searching for data over a stack of different cloud technologies (Salesforce, Dropbox, G Suite, etc) is like hitting the bars every weekend, hoping your soulmate walks up beside you and asks, what’s your sign?

Sure, you might get lucky, but chances are at the end of the night you’ll be left sifting through irrelevant results and looking for your match in all the wrong places.

We just launched the world’s best wingman for your cloud technology suite. Using AI technologies, Swiftype Enterprise Search understands context — we get that it’s not just about what you say, but how you say it.

We’ve married artificial intelligence with our industry-leading algorithm, to make indexing content across disparate cloud data sources effortless. Employees get the information they need, when and where they need it.

Stop settling. Get Swiftype Enterprise Search and fall in love with your cloud technologies again.

User experience continues to be the driving force behind technology, and our expectations as consumers are growing every day. Just look at any successful app on your phone —- from Uber to Instagram — and it’s clear that a refined user experience is very important to those businesses. We’re also in a time where AI is beginning to make a measurable impact on our lives — most notably when it comes to Search. Whether you are asking Siri a question or searching the web for a restaurant menu, we as consumers are again coming to expect the technologies we consume to exhibit increasingly complex levels of machine intelligence. Despite this, the technologies we utilize in our professional lives have remained mostly unchanged, and today they stand in stark contrast to the experiences we enjoy elsewhere.

Think about how often you sit in front of your computer thinking “is there something that already exists that could help me right now?”  Most people will give search a try, scroll through a few results, ask a couple of colleagues, but eventually give up and embark on creating something from scratch. Searching through all the data you need to do your job has never been easy, but today’s employees face an even greater challenge because the work they do gets scattered across a multitude of popular software platforms — from Google to Dropbox to Salesforce. At Swiftype, we believe this makes enterprise search for modern businesses a much more complex and important problem than ever before.

Today, we’re excited to announce a new product that addresses this problem head-on: Swiftype Enterprise Search. By integrating artificial intelligence with our industry leading search technology, Swiftype Enterprise Search is a powerful new way for employees to seamlessly access the data they need, from any device, across the many applications their jobs require. Our new platform will bridge the gap between the tools we use at work and the expectations we’ve developed from our consumer experiences.

We’re excited to show you more and invite you to sign up for a free 7-Day Trial of Swiftype Enterprise Search.  We’re confident that it will transform the way you and your employees search and work.  Read more about how it works here and start connecting!