We are thrilled today to announce that Swiftype is joining forces with Elastic, the makers of Elasticsearch. This new alliance will accelerate the development of new features and tools that will make it easier for you to manage and deploy world-class search functionality to your website or organization. The Swiftype product suite will continue to serve our existing and future customers, and we could not be more excited for the road ahead. The full copy of our joint announcement (also available on the Elastic blog) follows:

A note from Shay Banon, CEO at Elastic

I am thrilled to announce that Swiftype is joining forces with us. Swiftype is the creator of a highly-regarded, popular SaaS-based Site Search product and a newly launched Enterprise Search product. Meet Matt and Quin in a Swiftype webinar coming up on November 29.

Some of you may be wondering, why is a company focused on building SaaS search applications joining forces with a search technology company?

As I’ve said, I’ve always viewed ‘search’ as a wonderful foundation to solve many different use cases, whether it is search embedded in an application; search used for logging, security, or metrics; or search being used to create a whole set of new applications and products. Well, Swiftype did this. They built an entire company focused on making it simple for users to put a search box on their websites or within their applications and an enterprise search product for organizations to manage disparate content from various web applications.

Swiftype’s first product is Site Search. If you go to websites like Asana, Shopify, SurveyMonkey, and TechCrunch, that’s the Swiftype Site Search product powering the search box experience. And under the hood of Site Search, is Elasticsearch. In fact, Swiftype has been using Elasticsearch for a long time, since Elasticsearch version 0.90 for indexing and storing searchable content. Like so many other successful SaaS companies do, Swiftype created an amazing user interface and a lot of infrastructure around Elasticsearch to provide an incredible SaaS-first Site Search experience. I’m excited to announce that Site Search will be offered with a new introductory subscription plan starting at $79/month (explore with a free trial). This will allow customers to grow at their own pace. In addition, Swiftype’s Site Search also provides an ideal migration path for Google Site Search (GSS) customers.

Earlier this year, Swiftype released its second product, Swiftype Enterprise Search. This product has web crawlers and out-of-the-box connectors to cloud applications like Atlassian, Box, Dropbox, Github, Google Apps, Microsoft Outlook, Salesforce, Slack, Zendesk, and an API to build custom connectors. With the EOL of traditional enterprise search products like GSA (Google Search Appliance), Swiftype Enterprise Search meets the needs of today’s modern organization using many cloud-based shared and private content repositories. Effective immediately, Swiftype’s Enterprise Search product will be available as a beta via trial request. As we move towards making it GA, our combined engineering teams will integrate more capabilities of the Elastic Stack and X-Pack into this product, as well as make this product available as both a SaaS service and on-premise solution.

I’d like to welcome the entire Swiftype team, customers and community to the Elastic family. It’s really exciting that Swiftype’s founders — Matt Riley and Quin Hoxie — and the Swiftype team are joining us to further extend our vision to offer tailored solutions on top of the Elastic Stack.

Now some words from Swiftype’s founders.

A note from Matt Riley and Quin Hoxie

Swiftype set out to build a cloud-based search platform that dramatically simplified the process of creating powerful, high-quality search experiences. With the ever-growing amount of content published on the web, and with consumers expecting intuitive search tools, the need for world-class search capabilities is greater than ever before for businesses of all sizes. Our ongoing goal has been to stay ahead of this need by delivering incredible search for any team, technically savvy or not.

When we began designing our own infrastructure, we made an early bet on Elasticsearch as a foundational technology in our system — and it turned out to be a good one. Elasticsearch not only powers our primary search functionality, but has also grown to support a wide variety of other product and operational use cases. Suffice to say, we have been power users of Elasticsearch for almost as long as is possible, and we’re thrilled to now be part of this incredible team spearheading the next wave of innovation in search.

It quickly became obvious when meeting the team at Elastic that it was a special company, and as we learned more about Shay’s vision for the future, we were confident that we had found an amazing partner in the pursuit of our mission. As part of Elastic we could not be more excited to continue innovating with the Swiftype product suite and delivering an amazing service to our customers around the world.

We all know how tough job hunting is, especially for recent college graduates. We’ve ALL been there. Fortunately, there are ways for students to prepare for the “working-world” while they are still in college to help make themselves stand out amongst other job applicants.

In this episode, we’re joined by two of Swiftype’s most recent grads: Sam Reid, Growth Marketing Manager, and Kara Chen, Marketing Coordinator. They’re here today to share some insights on how they got hired at Swiftype and their thoughts about working at a startup. Both Sam and Kara were rockstars in college; from holding executive positions in their clubs, to personally reaching out to professionals, to studying abroad, their hard work has definitely paid off and we’re so glad to have them on the team.

You don’t want to miss this episode

Listen along as Sam and Kara take us through their journey from college grads to startup marketers!

If you’re longing to learn more about Sam and Kara, make sure to check out both of their blog posts.

Sam: Why I joined Swiftype: Great people and endless opportunity

Kara: Swiftype Through the Eyes of an Intern 👀

Enjoy and stay tuned for our next episode of the Swiftype Podcast!

I recently moved from Austin, TX to join Swiftype here in San Francisco. Although I was leaving my family, friends and the great Lone Star State behind, I knew that when Swiftype extended me an offer I had to accept. Here’s why.

Reason #1 – The Founders

Swiftype has two amazing founders – Matt Riley and Quin Hoxie. Matt, the CEO, is also from Texas so we had that in common from the start. Matt studied Electrical Engineering at Texas and was Director of Product at Scribd before starting Swiftype with Quin. Quin, the CTO, studied CS at Arizona and was also at Scribd before co-founding Swiftype. These guys are a pleasure to be around and I’m constantly learning from them.

Reason #2 – The People

When I visited the Swiftype office for my interview, every employee I came across went out of their way to say hello. This really had an impact on me and influenced my decision to pack up my life and move to California. In addition to thoughtful, the people at Swiftype are super smart and dedicated. I’m always picking up new things from my coworkers and find myself impressed with our people on a daily basis. And I’m not the only one who feels this way. Just ask Chris, one of our engineers.

Reason #3 – The Culture

Swiftype fosters a culture that is relaxed but fast-moving and focused at the same time. Obviously, results matter at Swiftype but our people also know how to have some fun while crushing their goals. It’s well known that people perform at their highest level when they can be themselves at work. This actually happens at Swiftype, and I think it’s a key element of the company’s success so far.

Here’s a fact about the Swiftype culture – When a new employee joins the company, we put a box of delicious Specialty’s cookies on their desk so that other employees come by throughout the day.

Reason #4 – My Team

The marketing team at Swiftype is special. We have a great leader in Praveena Khatri who sets the tone and keeps us moving in the right direction. Before joining Swiftype, I had worked at small startups and didn’t have much experience with Salesforce or Marketo. The marketing team helped me quickly get up to speed with these important platforms. Additionally, the Swiftype marketing team is the largest team I’ve been a part of. Nevertheless, I found it very easy to mesh with the team, collaborate on projects and push things forward.

Reason #5 – The Market Size and Opportunity

Our search technology at Swiftype is in a league of its own. Today, we power search for over 500,000 websites and serve great companies like Lyft, Okta, Twilio, Qualcomm, NBC Universal, HubSpot, Cloudflare and Asana. If you have a customer-facing website and you aren’t using Swiftype Site Search, you’re truly doing your company a disservice.

There are around 4,300 publicly traded companies (Source: World Bank) and 27.9 million small businesses in the US (Source: US Gov’t). Considering that most companies need a website these days, we have a large total addressable market at Swiftype. And we’re just talking about the market for our site search product in the US. (My nickname on the marketing team is CrunchBase, so I guess it makes sense that I sized up our market opportunity)

Recently, we launched a new product – Swiftype Enterprise Search. Swiftype Enterprise Search enables a company to search across all their internal data, no matter where it’s hosted, from one search bar. Historically, only really big companies needed an enterprise search solution but that has changed. Over the past 5 years, there has been a proliferation of high-quality SaaS apps and productivity tools.  But these apps have also introduced a data fragmentation problem that is pushing back on that progress — causing frustration within teams, duplication of work, and overall inefficiency. Swiftype solves this data fragmentation problem for both startups and Fortune 500s – helping companies to be more productive and get the most out of their data.

Swiftype is Hiring!

I’m a huge believer in both of our products and can’t wait to see how much we grow over the next year. If you’re interested in joining Swiftype, you can check out our careers page for our current openings and apply.

Hi, I’m Kara! I am a marketing intern here at Swiftype.

July 12 marked one full month of working as a marketing intern at Swiftype and it has been a very rewarding month, to say the least. This isn’t your typical internship where you show up to work begrudgingly expecting to be at your desk twirling your thumbs all day; or pick up coffee for your supervisor; or simply record minutes at meetings.

To be honest, it has been the complete opposite of that here at Swiftype. I graduated from Cal Poly Pomona on June 11 and flew back that night, then started the very next morning on June 12. I have basically been ambushed with a significant workload since Day 1. (Note: I definitely painted Swiftype as an evil company, but I promise it is not as vile as I make it sound. I was actually excited to start.)

The excitement wasn’t for nothing. Swiftype has far surpassed my expectations. Even though I’ve only been in this seat for one month, Swiftype has already brought me so much knowledge about marketing, tech startups, and marketing at tech startups. Every single person in the office strongly believes in the power of our products and care about my future career. I am very hands-on with projects — including assisting with advertising on podcasts, creating social media posts (and this blog), finding leads and sorting them in Salesforce, monitoring the website using Google Analytics and Moz, creating emails in Marketo, etc — and can confidently say that I contribute to the success of Swiftype. The company has done a great job in marrying personal growth and responsibility into this internship position. Not an easy feat.

Working at Swiftype is not all hard work. I genuinely enjoy coming into the office everyday because of the collaborative atmosphere, beautiful office and view, thrill of a new sale, wall filled with snacks, catered breakfast and lunch, and random Nerf gun bullets flying over my head. Not to mention last Thursday, which was my first Happy Hour/Game Night at the office. There was light hearted music and laughter yet cutthroat rivalry from the company-wide shuffleboard tournament, which more-or-less reflects the company persona.

Swiftype is truly an incredible company and I am very fortunate to have the opportunity to begin my marketing career here.

Think you’d be a great fit for the Swiftype team? Check out our openings and let us know if there’s a position that’s perfect for you!

I’m Brian, a Software Engineer at Swiftype. I’ve been working a lot on Swiftype Enterprise Search, and I use it every day.

I had our rotating “Support Wizard” hat this week, which means I’m responsible for addressing customer inquiries and cases for the week. Enterprise Search helped me close a customer case in 15 seconds. The customer needed to whitelist our crawler’s IP addresses so we could crawl their site. I went to search.swiftype.com in my browser and searched for “crawler ip ranges.” I clicked the first result from Help Scout and it took me to a recent ticket requesting the same information but from a different customer. Bam! That’s exactly what I was looking for! Case closed.

 

When dealing with code, I use Enterprise Search for a number of different things. The browser extension is super handy when reviewing Pull Requests (PR) in Github. For example, I was looking at a PR that was pulling in a newer version of nokogiri, but it didn’t have a lot of context. All it had was the version bump, the new version of the gem, and small commit message. I opened the Enterprise Search Chrome extension and I was immediately presented with other PRs and Jira tickets related to the same body of work. I was able to click through to those results to get a much better idea of where and why those changes were taking place. At that point, I had much more context and was able to effectively review the changes in front of me. The browser extension is perfect for that – I can open it up on a pull request on Github and see a plethora of additional, relevant PRs and Jira tickets for that area of code.

Using the browser extension with Jira is also super helpful. If I’m looking at a ticket in Jira, it shows me all open pull requests and any other related Jira tickets that may not have been linked. Furthermore, it shows me all of our sprint planning docs in Google Drive and Dropbox, due to our full text extraction capabilities and fine-tuned search algorithms.

One of my favorite things to use Enterprise Search for is when I’m working with our Design team. They create a lot of visual content, like mockups and templates, but where that content is stored in Dropbox isn’t exactly self-evident. So when I’m working on a project that requires implementing their designs, rather than trying to wade through the ocean of digital assets in Dropbox, or bug them to send me an exported version of the new design, I just search for the content in the Enterprise Search app.  I use really simple, but extremely powerful queries like “new dashboard design in dropbox” or “sidebar icons in dropbox.” The search results all have image previews of the visual content they’ve been designing, so I can quickly scan them to find exactly what I’m looking for in an instant.

I also use Enterprise Search to show me all of the open pull requests assigned to me, across all of our repositories. It’s extremely useful because I don’t have to go to each repository individually to check for those PRs I need to take action on. I also sometimes use it to see PRs assigned to other people, in case they’re out sick, for example.

Speaking of people, the “Person View” is pretty awesome. One of my developers just went on vacation and I needed to be able to see what he was working on to be able to get the work done before the end of the sprint. I just searched for “Chris,” and because he was automatically created as a person in our organization (just by signing up for an account), I was able to see all of his recent changes across all our repositories in Github and other sources. I was able to jump on the highest priority task he was working on and finish it off. Success! I was also able to get more context on the other issues he was working on because I found some conversations he had with other engineers in Slack, and comments he made on tickets in Help Scout.

We also just hired a new engineer (who is coincidentally also named Brian)! I was helping him get up to speed and needed to find this mythical “onboarding” document. I did a quick search for “welcome guide”, and sure enough, the document showed up as the first result. And with a few more quick searches, I was able to find all the other onboarding documents that were scattered around our various cloud services. It’s so handy, and easy, to be able to search and find documents like this. It saves me so much time!

Last but not least, I use the mobile app to receive notifications for upcoming meetings. We have a sprint planning meeting every two weeks, so I get a notification on my phone that says hey, there’s this sprint planning meeting coming up, do you want to review these documents first? And I’m like yeah! I do want to review those docs so I can remember what we’re talking about at sprint planning! Thanks, Swiftype!

Welcome to Swiftype Headquarters in San Francisco, California. Founders Matt Riley and Quin Hoxie have created a comfortable and fun office environment with an open floor plan, scattered lounges, and various collaborative areas. Take a look at our office photos below to experience a day in the life of a Swiftype team member.

There are Muni and BART stations just a few blocks from our office, perfect for commuting or being a train ride away from where you need to be.

Our office building is on 301 Howard Street (between Fremont and Beale), in the middle of downtown San Francisco.

Need a coffee boost to start your day? Starbucks is right across the street.

Not a fan of Starbucks? Grab a freshly squeezed juice right downstairs at Joe & The Juice.

We are on the 13th floor. Welcome to Swiftype.

Mini Matt and Quin welcome you to our office!

An open workspace designed for maximum collaboration.

Find privacy and be productive. Soundproof phone booths for taking meetings and private calls.

Head over to our fully-stocked snack bar to grab whatever you need to boost your day.

Did I mention we get FREE catered breakfast and lunch?  Thanks Zesty!

Yes, we LOVE hot sauce.

Oh and we have a keg…for all occasions!

Got game? We are recruiting for a Rock Band player. Are you in?

Not a bad view huh?

Like what you see? We’re hiring for a variety of positions.

I joined Swiftype shortly after graduating from Georgia Tech with a B.S. in Computer Engineering last May. I got to spend four years in Atlanta, which provided me an amazing startup ecosystem that let me invest a significant amount of time while still being a college student. I was able to work on a great team at Springbot and build out and launch an MVP at Stackfolio. I got to venture out a bit and intern at MongoDB last summer as well.

The startups I got to work with varied quite a bit in size, and I decided I wanted to join a startup with a small, somewhat established development team. I think this sweet spot is the best type of environment for growing as a software developer. Swiftype definitely fit that criteria, and much more.

Reasons I ended up signing my life to Swiftype:

• I can see value in the product.
  • I always default to using the “site:www.website.com” syntax on google instead of using a website’s dedicated search tool. I think it’s silly that the majority of websites get beaten by a generic web crawler at finding their own content.
• Swiftype gave me the time of day.
  • Quin [the CTO of Swiftype] personally reached out to me the day before my interview with a phone call and a follow-up email to make sure I was doing fine and made my way to San Francisco without issue. He also was very active throughout my entire interview process to make sure everything went smoothly. I got the feeling that he actually (even if just a little bit) cared about me.
  • I got the opportunity to ask in-depth questions about the company and its technology, which caused my interview to run way longer than scheduled. Swiftype was one of the few companies that was happy to take the time to give me in-depth answers.
  • Initial contact to offer was less than three weeks. (Not the quickest of all time, but considering I was on the other side of the world or on a plane for 9 days of that time, I’d say it’s pretty good.
• I got a clear idea of what I would be doing.
  • More often than not, I think new software developers go into jobs pretty blind on what they’re actually going to do. I learned this the hard way through my first internship! It’s perfectly understandable given many circumstances, and perfectly reasonable for people to put themselves into that situation, but it still makes me very uncomfortable.
• I knew who I’d be working with.
  • I got to interview with the entire engineering team. I left with the feeling that if I could be where they are when I get to their age, I’d be pretty happy with my career. We’ll see how that turns out.
• Swiftype aligned with my interests.
  • The vast majority of my abandoned personal projects revolved around scraping data and doing something with it. I only found a select few startups whose business revolved around this concept and actually did meaningful things with it.
• Super soft hoodies that actually look normal.
  • At least at the time, this was a priority. Unfortunately, not many people or companies actually took me seriously, which is understandable. Regardless, this is my public request for the long awaited Swiftype hoodie V2.
• Positive Culture inclinations.
  • It’s tough to evaluate culture through interviews that span a short amount of time. But I got the same baseline vibes from the Swiftype engineering team as the friendliest, heartwarming development team I interviewed with in Tennessee. This absolutely wasn’t a priority while I was in the job search, but looking back on it, this definitely helped me make a quick decision to say yes to Swiftype.

*****

Note from the Swiftype Team:
Looking for a new opportunity? Jonesing to work with a talented, up-and-coming software development team? Really into soft hoodies and free lunch? You might be a great fit for the Swiftype team! We’re not on Tinder, but you can check out our careers page for our current openings and apply. 

Today we’re excited to announce that we’ve raised a $13 million Series B financing led by our investors at NEA. We’ve actually worked with NEA since our company was only a few weeks old — first as a part of the Seed round we raised during Y Combinator and again when they led our Series A in September of 2013 — and we’re delighted to further our partnership with them today. We’re also excited to officially welcome NEA Partner Chetan Puttagunta to the Swiftype board.

Swiftype has come a long way since graduating from Y Combinator in March of 2012. Quin and I started the company alone in an apartment in Mountain View, CA, adding Luke Francl and Oleksiy Kovyrin as quickly as we could convince them, and then the team stayed that size for a while. But today we’re a team of over 25 incredibly talented individuals, and our business has grown similarly. Today we power billions of queries every month across hundreds of thousands of websites, mobile applications, and SaaS applications. Along the way we’ve had the privilege of working with many fantastic companies, including Qualcomm, CloudFlare, Shopify, and Twitch. It has taken a tremendous amount of dedication — and a lot of hard work — from our entire team to get to where we are today, and I couldn’t be more proud of the progress we’ve made so far.

Looking ahead, these new funds will fuel our continued growth as we look to bring on more search engineers, expand our sales and marketing efforts, and establish a stronger position of leadership within the search industry.

If you’re interested in joining a quickly growing, fast-paced organization, we encourage you to check out our jobs page. We’re always excited to meet new people who are interested in joining the Swiftype team, and we’d love to hear how you can contribute.

Swiftype site search was featured as LeanStack’s service of the week. As part of that I wrote a guest blog post about how Swiftype uses cloud services to run our business.

“Implementing a better product with less hassle is really only half the advantage of using a service like ours. The other half — which doesn’t seem to get as much marketing play — is that by leveraging the product of a company dedicated to a single, specific technology, you realize the gains of having a full-time team of domain experts dedicated to improving your search feature, without assuming any of the cost. At Swiftype we spend all of our time thinking about, developing, and iterating on search, and every time we ship an improvement, all of our customers reap the benefits instantly. Our experience has shown that at most companies it can be a full-time job just maintaining an internal search system, much less improving it over time. When search isn’t a core competency of your company, we believe you’re better off letting us take care of the details. And of course the same philosophy applies to our company as well, which is why we leverage so many existing cloud-based services in our daily operations. Anywhere that we can save time and resources using a product that another company focuses their full effort on delivering is a win for us, because it allows us to spend our resources on what we do best — building great search software.”

Read the post to learn more about our cloud stack and the services we use.

If you liked this post, please remember to bookmark our blog and subscribe to our newsletter. We’ll be posting announcements and more from the Swiftype team, as well as our friends and partners who power their search with Swiftype, such as Laughing Squid.

Paul Graham’s advice to entrepreneurs is simple – “Make something people want.” Make being the easy part and what people want being the much harder part. In the startup world, there are several interesting techniques for figuring out what people want. Customer Development, User Surveys, Crowdsourced idea generation etc. However my recent favorite is Swiftype’s weekly analytics email. Let me explain.

Quickly See What People Are Searching For

The following screenshot is from Swiftype’s sample report:

The first section of the email let’s you see at a glance what your users are searching for. We use Swiftype to power our documentation search, so our search terms tell us what our users most need help with. The top search for us right now is “email.” This make senses because our users typically want to know how to setup email. The top few keywords gave us a good sense of what our users are looking for right after signing up and have helped us shape up our product tour.

Figure out What New Stuff to Build

The second section of the email is more interesting. You can see which searches returned no results at all:

In our case, the missing searches could mean one of the two things: * A feature/functionality that we have but which is missing documentation. * A feature that we don’t have.

For us it’s mostly the latter. For example the top result for us in this category is “reports”, since we don’t have reporting yet (our early adopters did not care for it but we are working on it now). Using this feature we also realized that people are looking for integrations like Pivotal, JIRA etc. Based on this, we decided to work on a hosted app platform that we will be rolling out in a few weeks.

Either way, we learn exactly where we need to improve. It could be improvements to an existing feature (adding documentation, improving the UX) or ideas for new features. Used with other techniques like user interviews and analytics, Swiftype has really helped us improve our app. In the future, we plan on using Swiftype to power our app directory search so we can find out ideas for new apps. The same technique can be applied to your marketing site as well.