One of the coolest features that Swiftype’s site search software offers is the ability to drag and drop to rearrnage results that users see for any search query. Using the Result Ranking tool, the Marketing Team has been having a lot of fun coming up with the different ways to have this feature help us generate more leads and close more business. So, we decided that we would share our top 11 most useful use cases and how they could be useful for our customers.

1. White paper – If you’re a publisher who offers guarantees for lead gen packages or a demand generation team at a corporation, consider pinning your white papers and ebooks at the top of relevant search queries.
2. Webinar – Making sure that upcoming and on-demand webinars are at the top of key search results will significantly increase the chances of increasing registrants and upping the percentage that attend.
3. Video – searches with thumbnails get strong engagement from users. Pinning video testimonials or demos can help your prospect move down the marketing funnel at a much faster velocity.
4. Unused inventory (so that you can get rid of it) – E-commerce companies always struggle to find ways to get rid of last years collection. Need a new idea? Just pin those SKUs to the top of some converting search queries and watch your inventory fly off the shelves.
5. Top selling product(s) – Already have a product that’s selling like hot cakes? Then leverage your site search analytics to find other opportunities to sell that product.
6. Viral article – Similar approach to top selling products. If you know that an article is going viral, then increase the number of search queries that that article should be at the very top of to generate even more engagement.
7. The day’s top story – For publishers, the day’s top story can sometimes be buried in search results. Make sure that your top search queries show the newest and most relevant top stories.
8. FAQ/Support pages – If you are seeing that a piece of support or knowledge base content is helping lower call volumes, then find other queries that this content can help support.
9. Highest priority job posting – Recruiters should take advantage of site search analytics to see what kinds of jobs prospective candidates are looking for. These insights will help you pin your highest priority jobs to appropriate searches to help you generate more applications to that job.
10. Most recent op-ed – Have an editorial that delivers your company’s new fresh message, make sure to pin it to the top of relevant search queries for highest visibility.
11. Sponsored content – If you are a publisher who offers your advertisers sponsored content, you can work with your advertiser to make sure that their content is pinned to the top of the search results that they’re trying to target. This is a great money making opportunity and easy way to build deeper trust with your advertisers.

Have any pinning use cases that we haven’t already mentioned? Send them our way at [email protected]—we’d love to hear how you’re using Result Ranking to improve your on site search experience.

This week we are excited to announce a new white paper from Swiftype: Designing Ecommerce for the Mobile Shopper. Here at Swiftype we’ve been fascinated by the steady growth of mobile across every corner of the web, and wanted to summarize our research and findings in a report that looks closely at the influence of mobile in the ecommerce space.

As a starting point, the report aims to uncover the differences in behavior that distinguish mobile shoppers from those on desktop, looking at the relationship between online sales and online traffic across different types of devices. Questions addressed include:

• How has mobile ecommerce grown in the past few years and how will this trend develop moving forward?
• How do the aims of mobile shoppers differ from shoppers on desktop?
• What strategies have industry leaders adopted to optimize their mobile ecommerce experience?

This report also looks at the differences between ecommerce trends within apps and on mobile browsers, helping site owners determine where they should focus their development efforts as they look to optimize their business for the increasingly prominent mobile shopper. To access your copy of the report, follow the link below.

Creating an engaging user experience is paramount to the success of digital publishing. A primary component of any engagement strategy is helping your users find content that is timely, interesting, and relevant to their interests. But how can you do that? Your first consideration should be your data and analytics.

Join Ben Lack, Senior Director of Marketing and Business Development for Swiftype, and Clare Carr, Director of Marketing for Parse.ly, as they cover the best questions to ask of your data and analytics to find out what your readers want and how to get it to them. See how top media brands and digital publishers are using the answers they find about their audience to power their editorial and product strategies.

• What metrics really mean and what they’re telling you about your audience
• 5 Questions about what your readers want that anyone on your team should be able to answer
• Examples of how premium publishers are using analytics to grow their loyal audiences
• Insights from Swiftype’s billions of search queries and Parse.ly‘s billions of network page views about what audiences want from all publishing sites.

So sign up today, then tune in on August 19 for a deep dive on how your editorial and publishing teams can improve your users online experience. Invite your colleagues to join, too!

For any business pushing a content marketing strategy, every white paper download, webinar registration, and video view is critical to generating quality leads and achieving a positive ROI. While SEO, email marketing, and paid acquisition are all useful strategies to drive users to this content, at Swiftype we also use our own tool to promote content based on user search activity. Here’s how.

Swiftype offers site owners a unique tool to promote content for visitors who use site search: Custom Result Ranking. This tool lets site owners customize the order of search results for a specific query, dragging and dropping existing results to a new order, adding new results that don’t appear by default, or eliminating results they don’t want displayed.

With this tool, site owners can “pin” specific pieces of content at the top position for related searches to drive users to these high value landing pages. For example, we have pinned our white paper Understanding Ecommerce Site Search Analytics, as the top result when people search “ecommerce.” With this new result order, we see a significantly higher number of white paper downloads each week that result from site search.

Adding marketing automation landing pages
However, in many cases (including our own) these landing pages are hosted on a different domain than your main website, generated by the specific marketing automation platform your team uses (such as info.website.com, go.website.com, or many others). Because these pages exist on a separate domain, Swiftbot will not automatically discover and index these pages on the initial crawl of your website—meaning they will not initially be discoverable through search. To add these external landing pages to their search engine, Swiftype users can use the Domains tab in their Swiftype Dashboard. Let’s take a look at this process in action.

To access the Domains tab, simply click on the icon from your Dashboard home page or navigation bar. Here you can manage the domains that comprise your search engine index. For example, we combine our main site (https://swiftype.com) and our blog (http://blog.swiftype.com) in one search engine to let users search across both properties at the same time.

To add your landing pages, you simply have to add your landing page URL as a new domain. To do so, paste the complete URL of any landing page in the new domain box, then click verify to have Swiftbot index the page and add it to your search engine. Note that because these landing pages often don’t contain links to other pages of the same domain (which Swiftbot uses to create an index from a single url) you may see an alert warning you that Swiftbot will not be able to index additional pages beyond this one landing page. However, this will not cause any problems, and you can simply click Add Domain to proceed.

From here, you can add additional landing pages by managing your domain rules, accessible by clicking “Manage Rules” next to the domain you just added. To add another landing page, simply click “Add URL” in the top right corner and then paste the unique URL of each landing page you’d like to add. Once these pages become part of your search engine, you can add them as a top result (or any other result) to any query you would like from the Rankings tab.

As your users interact with your on site search engine, you’ll be able to see the number of clicks these pinned results receive for specific queries in the Rankings tab, as well as the top referring queries and autocomplete prefixes that lead users to this page by looking at the Details section of each page in the Content tab.

With this tool, Swiftype allows site owners to personally curate search results, giving marketers and site owners yet another way to promote content and ultimately drive their lead generation efforts. For help with this process, or to get in touch with a member of the Swiftype team, email [email protected].

As you’re getting started with Swiftype, you may be wondering how to index thumbnails from your website and serve them to users in your search results. The answer to this question lies in using Swiftype’s custom <meta> tags, which allow site owners to pass detailed web page information directly to Swiftbot, our web crawler, as it moves across your site. As Swiftbot encounters these custom Swiftype <meta> tags, it indexes their content and incorporates that information in your search engine index schema.

To index thumbnails from your website, all you need to do is add a Swiftype image <meta> tag to the <head> section of your website template that indicates where images are located on your various page types. For illustration purposes, the Swiftype image <meta> tag is formatted like this:

Swiftype recommends placing these <meta> tags at the template level of your website to ensure that image files are dynamically populated within the tags, rather than being added manually for every page on site.

NOTE: the value of the “content” attribute must be HTML encoded. For more information see this guide.

Alternatively, you can wrap images with a body-embedded Swiftype image <meta> tag to avoid changing your website <head>. For example, Swiftbot will index example.jpg into the image field from the HTML below:

<body>

Hello world

 

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed ut risus sed ante dignissim pharetra aliquet a orci. Maecenas varius.

 

In in augue molestie, bibendum velit vel, luctus erat. Curabitur cursus, tellus at feugiat lacinia, tellus est suscipit lectus, non commodo diam elit sit amet justo.

http://fullurl.com/example.jpg </body>

It is important to note that in both the <head> and <body> embedded <meta> tags, you need to specify the data-type attribute as enum. For images, this will always be the case. For any other custom meta tags you choose to define, each attribute must be a valid, Swiftype-supported field type, which you may read about here.

Once you index thumbnails from your website, you can easily customize your search results and autocomplete to feature thumbnails in a range of shapes and sizes with the Swiftype Result Designer.

To learn more about using custom Swiftype <meta> tags to refine your search engine index, check out our tutorial. As always, if you need help or have any questions, feel free to reach out to us at [email protected].

This post was initially published by Internet Retailer—a leading source of ecommerce news and publications.

One of my favorite tools for online research is the Internet Archive—a 501(c)(3) non-profit devoted to the digital preservation of the web as it evolves, crawling the web and capturing how various web pages have looked at different points in time. As someone who spends time researching and writing about web design, I’ve relied on this tool to trace the evolution of numerous websites—Amazon.com being one of the most fascinating websites to study in light of its ever increasing power and influence over the web, particularly the realm of ecommerce.

While Amazon’s homepage design has evolved in response to a wide range of influences and company goals, one of the most striking changes has been the increasingly prominent role that the search bar plays in the user experience. Viewed in the context of the internet’s larger history, this evolution makes logical sense: Google and Amazon were both founded around the same time (1994 and 1998, respectively), and while Google has made more of a name for itself as the innovator in search technologies, search technology at Amazon has had to evolve alongside Google because of the tremendously important role it plays in ecommerce.

Considering the tremendous strides that Google has made in search technology over the last fifteen years, it should come as no surprise that Amazon has had to work equally as hard to keep pace (today still, Amazon has an entire section of its job site devoted to Search and Discovery Technologies positions). As Amazon’s search has bar has become more useful and more powerful, it has become increasingly valuable to users. And the more valuable it has become, the more devoted real estate it has received across the homepage and website.

Let’s trace this evolution with a series of screenshots from Amazon’s homepage over the last fifteen years, focusing on the changing size and position of the search bar.

May 10, 2000: Search begins somewhat obscurely tucked in the top left corner. Amazon provides the option to filter searches to a specific subsection of the site and a suggested query to inspire users, but the sidebar below the search bar remains a primary navigation tool. This design remains largely unchanged for the next six years.

June 2, 2007: Search occupies a much more prominent space in the header of the page, but the sidebar remains equally prominent as a critical navigation tool.

June 15, 2012: Amazon eliminates the sidebar, offering instead a single search bar to serve as the primary portal for users entering the site.

June 9, 2015: Not only does search remain the most prominent feature in the header of Amazon’s homepage, but the search bar now sticks to the top of the page as shoppers scroll.

The trend across these images is clear. As search technology has improved on Amazon, the search bar has become a more valuable asset in the user experience and has accordingly taken a more prominent position the homepage. At the same time, with the dominance that Google exercises across the web, user expectations for search have steadily risen as well—a development which undoubtedly contributed to Amazon’s shift towards such a search-centric user experience.

Another major takeaway from this evolution is the massive amount of data that Amazon is able to collect as a result of their massive search volume. On site search queries are arguably the clearest expression of user intent available to site owners, and Amazon continually leverages this information to intelligently promote products across their website—a subject and design evolution that merits its own post entirely.

To learn more about best practices for site search design and see example implementations, read our post on Swiftype’s favorite implementations from 2014.

Since our founding in 2012, Swiftype has worked hard to let site owners install powerful, user-friendly search on their website without writing code. To take this vision even further, we are excited to announce a new feature this week: The Swiftype Result Designer.

The Swiftype Result Designer allows site owners to style their search results and autocomplete directly from the Swiftype dashboard, making it easy to integrate Swiftype search with the existing look and feel of your website. For a brief overview of how the Swiftype Result Designer works, watch the screencast below.

With the new Result Designer, Swiftype users can

• Choose between multiple search result display methods
• Add thumbnails to search results and autocomplete suggestions
• Decide which page attributes to display in search results
• Customize search result text and snippet highlighting colors
• Change their search result and autocomplete design as frequently as they would like, without ever touching their code base

For new Swiftype users, the Result Designer can be accessed under the INTEGRATE tab, on the INSTALL SEARCH page. For Swiftype users who created their engines before this new installation process was launched in mid-April and would like to transition to this new javascript embed, follow the instructions on the INSTALL page in your Swiftype dashboard or visit our tutorial here.

This is the first in a series of exciting updates that the Swiftype team is making to the installation process. Stay tuned for more updates over the next few months, including new tools to custom style your own facets, filters, and sorting tools—all without writing a single line of code.

Try out the Result Designer today by creating a free account.

We’ve made some exciting new changes to our Shopify Swiftype app that give store owners an unprecedented level of control over how their search results and autocomplete drop-down menu appear to users.

Before these changes, the Swiftype Shopify app offered limited control over how search results appeared within your selected theme. However, after releasing our second edition of the Shopify app last week, the default result display mode is highly flexible and Shopify store owners can even fine tune the look and feel of their search experience through the Swiftype dashboard. Let’s explore these new changes in detail.

Installation

Installing the Swiftype app on your Shopify store works much the same as it always has. Simply visit the Swiftype app listing, click “Get,” and enter your Shopify store URL.

From here, Swiftype will automatically index your products and create a search engine for you. Depending on the size of your product set, this process can take a few minutes. Once complete, you will be directed to the Swiftype dashboard, where you can customize the look and feel of search (details below), gather detailed analytics on customer search behavior, and fine tune your search results to promote specific products. Let’s explore these features in turn, starting with the autocomplete and search result styling process.

Styling the search results and autocomplete

To customize the style of your search results and autocomplete drop-down, go to the “INSTALL SEARCH” page under the “INTEGRATE” tab. On this page, click “START INSTALLATION” to get started. For Shopify app users, you will only need to make changes on the “APPEARANCE” section of the installation process. In this section, you can control

• how search results look
• how many search results appear on the results page
• the color of the search results text
• the style and color of the autocomplete drop-down menu

Specific instructions for all of these pieces can be found within the “APPEARANCE” section of the install page.

Once you have configured the search results, autocomplete, and the color of the results text, hit “SAVE & PREVIEW” on the “COLORS” page. To preview your changes before activating them on your site, simply type in a query and hit enter or click “SEARCH.” The styling you selected will preview directly in the dashboard, which you can go back and edit if you’re not happy with the appearance.

Once you are satisfied with the appearance of search results and autocomplete, click “SAVE.” This will navigate you to to the “activate” section where you can review your configuration before clicking “ACTIVATE SWIFTYPE” to push these changes to your live site.

Swiftype Dashboard: Analytics and customization

Once installed on your Shopify store, Swiftype collects detailed analytics about your website search traffic, the most popular searches on your site, what users are searching for but not finding, and more. Learn more >

With this detailed information in hand, you can customize search results to drive more sales on your Shopify store. Swiftype users have three tools to customize search results:

1. RESULT RANKINGS allows you to drag and drop to reorder search results for individual queries. You can also add in product results that don’t appear by default or eliminate products that you don’t want displayed for that query. Swiftype recommends you customize results for the top ten or twenty queries to fine tune results for popular searches. It is also a good idea to customize results for top queries which return no results, so users hit less dead ends on your site. Learn more >
2. WEIGHTS allow you to fine tune your relevance model and control how various attributes in your Shopify index impact search results. This tool can be used to promote products with high ratings, high popularity, or any other trait you choose. Learn more >
3. SYNONYMS allow you to synchronize search results for different words of the same meaning. This is especially useful for stores with high volumes of international traffic, since shoppers from different countries often use different words for the same product. Learn more >

For help installing Swiftype on your Shopify store, email [email protected].

One of the challenges we’ve had to deal with at Swiftype is that we have had customers pushing a lot of search and indexing traffic from very early on. When a customer is pushing hundreds of index updates per second, it’s important to respond quickly so we don’t start dropping requests.

In order to do that, we’ve built bulk create/update API endpoints to reduce the number of HTTP requests required to index a batch of documents and moved most processing out of the web request. We’ve also invested in front-end routing technology to limit the impact customers have on each other.

However, we were not satisfied. Sometimes when a large customer was indexing a huge number of documents, our front-end queues would still back up.  In the pursuit of even better response times for our customers, we’ve built an asynchronous indexing API. Our goals in creating the new API were high throughput, supporting bulk requests for all interactions, and excellent developer ergonomics. We wanted an API that was fast and easy to use.

Here’s how it works.

First, customers submit a batch of documents to create or update. The request for this looks just like our pre-existing bulk create or update API, but goes to a new endpoint.

When our server receives the response, it performs a quick sanity check on the input, without hitting the database. If all the input parameters are present and validly formatted, we create two records in our database for each document that was submitted: a document creation journal, and a document receipt.

For performance, we insert these rows using activerecord-import. This is a great library that uses a single INSERT statement with multiple rows. This results in a massive speed improvement compared to standard ActiveRecord when saving a large number of records. We also generate the IDs ahead of time using BSON. By generating the IDs ahead of time, we don’t need to get them from the database after inserting, and using BSON lets us encode a timestamp in the ID at the cost of a larger ID column.

Once created, we enqueue a message for each document creation journal onto a queue that is read by a pool of loops workers. Loops is a dead-simple background processing library written by our Technical Operations Lead, Oleksiy Kovyrin. It makes it easy to write code that does one thing forever, in this case, reading messages off the queue and creating the associated document in the database.

The response to the API request includes a way to check the status of all the document receipts. To make the API easy to use, we’re including URLs to the created resources. Though we’re not following all its precepts, this approach is inspired by the idea of the hypermedia API. These URLs make it easy for both humans and computers to find the resource.

Since the API is asynchronous, users must poll the document receipts API to check for the status of the document creation. We’ve built an abstraction in our Ruby client library that allows developers to simulate a synchronous request, although we recommend that only for development.

By pushing all work except for JSON parsing and the most minimal input validation to the backend, we’re able to respond to these API requests very quickly. On the backend, the loops workers read messages off the queue and create documents. When a loops worker attempts to create a document, it updates the document receipt (either with the status of “complete” and a link to the created/updated document, or with the status “failed” and a list of error messages) and deletes the document creation journal.

This brings us to one final aspect of the asynchronous API: how we make sure it keeps working. If our loops workers started failing, the document creation journals would back up without being processed, and no documents would be created/updated. To guard against this, we have built a monitoring framework that alerts us when the oldest record in the table is older than a certain threshold.

This solution has been successful for us in beta tests with our largest API users, and we have now rolled it out to everyone.

We hope this helps you build out your next high-throughput API. If this is the kind of thing you’re interested in, we’re hiring engineers for our core product and infrastructure teams.

As we’ve written before, search is a critical tool for self-service support centers. Users who enter the documentation or support section of a website generally have a clearly defined issue in mind, and a powerful search bar provides these users with a clear path to the content they are looking for.

To help more support centers bring great search to their users, Swiftype is excited to announce our integration with Zendesk Help Centers, making it easy for knowledge bases built with Zendesk to deliver the search experience that customers expect. With Swiftype powering search on your Zendesk Help Center, site owners have the power to customize results for individual queries, ensuring that users always find the most helpful content. Furthermore, Swiftype provides detailed analytics on what your users are searching for, providing key insight into user issues and identifying content gaps by populating a list of top queries that return no results.

With these tools and more, site owners can redefine their Help Center user experience by providing powerful and customizable search without the need to consult engineering. Get started by creating account today.