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.

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.

On the modern web, search bars are everywhere. Google, the modern address bar doubling as a search bar, and the prevalence of search tools throughout the web have trained users to expect a search option when they have a clear idea of what they are looking for. This clear idea—intent—makes visitors who use search one of the most valuable online audiences.

The power of Google’s web search and of major internet players’ such as Amazon’s site search often lead to an assumption that all search solutions offer the same experience that your visitors expect. However, if you’ve used many search functions, you know this is not true. While a comprehensive, simple solution to robust site search is the best way to ensure your site doesn’t disappoint your visitors, we’ve put together a list of steps that site owners can take to improve their search experience right away.

1. Use your search analytics. A search bar is an extremely unfiltered form of customer feedback—a free text box that asks the searcher to type in exactly what they want. This unfiltered feedback should be valued for what it is: a goldmine of analytics on your visitors. Be sure to listen to this feedback, checking for popular searches, searches that return no results, autocomplete selections where applicable, and any other information about what your visitors are looking for. You should then pipe these learnings into your marketing and product strategy. For example, an ecommerce company who sells shoes might notice that their visitors are searching for a brand they do not carry, suggesting that they should consider adding the brand.
2. Ensure your search is ready for mobile. The share of searches of occurring on mobile websites and in mobile apps is steadily increasing. As users begin to expect their experience to be seamless across their devices, a well-designed and powerful mobile search feature is becoming as important as a desktop search solution. Good mobile search generally includes a prominent, easily accessible search bar, as navigational elements such as breadcrumbs are often difficult to display clearly for mobile visitors. Also, be sure to optimize your results page, autocomplete dropdown, and product thumbnails for the smaller screen space available to mobile users.
3. Feature your search box prominently and intuitively. Visitors who start with search are your most valuable visitors—as much as 70% more likely to convert than those who avoid search. A search indicates a visitor came to the site for a reason, and a strong search experience moves that visitor to their desired destination quickly and painlessly. Featuring search also encourages your visitors to tell you what they are looking for, critical to an effective marketing and product strategy. To encourage searches from your visitors, make sure your search bar is prominent and intuitively located so that your visitors naturally use the feature. For inspiration, we’ve highlighted a few of our favorite search-driven site designs.
4. Offer autocomplete results. For each additional page a visitor sees on a website, there is an associated visitor drop-off. Offering autocomplete results in a dropdown reduces the time a searcher needs to spend waiting for a results page to load. This streamlined experience will delight your visitors and reduce friction in their experience.
5. Don’t ignore misspellings. We’ve all made typos when searching for something, either inadvertently or because we don’t know how to spell a tough word. The success of companies such as Google and Amazon in typo tolerance leads the average internet user to expect search tools to protect them from their mistakes. However, most do not come nearly close enough to Google or Amazon in typo protection, causing situations like this:
   
   As the screenshot shows, a missed space between words—the most common typo—in a query that should have results can return none. As modern searchers expect typo protection, not accounting for misspellings can lead visitors to believe their intended query has no results, driving them away from your site. Be sure to pay attention to the most common misspellings, and take steps to ensure your visitors do not mistakenly see a no results page.

Many of these issues are best addressed by using a third-party tool that has developed easy tools for managing issues like results reordering, spellcheck, synonyms, and autocomplete. However, each of these issues represent common problems with native search tools, and each can be rapidly improved simply by paying attention to them. We’ll be featuring more tips for improving your search in the future, so be sure to check the blog often. Finally, if you are looking for a solution to each of these issues that you can get up and running quickly, sign up for a Swiftype account and create your first engine.

Swiftype search is an invaluable tool for self-service support centers. That’s why we’re excited today to announce our integration with Desk.com, making it easy for support centers built on Desk.com to bring powerful search to their users. With Swiftype powering your Desk.com support center search engine, site owners get

• Detailed analytics. See what users are searching for most to identify common user issues, and see what queries are returning no results to identify gaps in your knowledge base. From there, site owners can create content to address these questions, or use Swiftype’s custom result ranking tool to add in search results for any query they want.
• Custom result ranking. Drag and drop to rearrange search results for individual queries through Swiftype’s user friendly dashboard, add in results that don’t appear by default, or eliminate individual results entirely. With this power, site owners can tightly customize search results for high volume queries, quickly guiding users to the right support content.
• Complete front end customization. Once Swiftype is installed, site owners can customize the look and feel of their search bar, autocomplete menu, and search results page to match the aesthetic of their help centers. For even more control, it’s possible to work with Swiftype meta tags to specify exactly what information our web crawler indexes as well as add custom fields and data.
  

And much more. For more information about Swiftype for Desk.com, check out our listing on the Desk.com app hub, or, for more information about Swiftype for self-service support centers and knowledge bases, check out our case studies.

To kick off 2015, we wanted to highlight some of our favorite 2014 Swiftype implementations across a range of different websites to demonstrate the results that some of our users have been able to achieve. In all, Swiftype started powering search on thousands of websites this year, and served billions of queries. Nearly three years after launching, we are excited that so many people have found Swiftype to be such an integral part of their website, and we want to share these stories to inspire users in the future.

Qualcomm

Qualcomm is a global semiconductor company that designs and markets wireless telecommunications products and services, serving millions of customers worldwide, with more than 25,000 employees across 150 offices. When Qualcomm approached a leading web development agency to help them rehaul their existing website, search was a top priority. Because Qualcomm offers such a wide variety of products and services, they wanted to create an easy browsing experience to let customers hone in on exactly what they are looking for quickly.

Qualcomm’s search implementation is great for several key reasons. To begin with, their search tool is prominently displayed on the left side of the page and remains visible on every page of the website. This makes it easy for users to search, browse, and re-search without needing to scroll to the top of the page. Another aspect we like is their autocomplete and faceted search options. The combination of these two features cuts down the time users need to spend searching by directing them straight to content they are looking for and letting them refine their results without moving to a separate results page. Lastly, we are happy to see the great results that this web development agency produced with Swiftype—providing their clients with a powerful search engine without the need for back end development work.

HubSpot

HubSpot is a major inbound marketing and sales platform that came to Swiftype for help powering their knowledge base search engine. While HubSpot’s support team had spent countless hours developing helpful content to answer user questions, their previous search solution did not allow enough control over their search experience. By switching to Swiftype, HubSpot was able to completely customize their search engine and create the user experience they hoped for.

HubSpot’s search is simple yet effective. For starters, we appreciate how they prominently displayed the search bar on their support page—a clear prompt for users to begin their support questions with a search. Furthermore, the placeholder text in the search bar clearly tells users how to interact with the search box, reassuring them that they should feel free to “type your question here.” From there, the fast autocomplete drop-down is color coded to differentiate between “quick answers” and “user guides,” letting users choose results based on the article type. Similar refinement options are available on their results page, where users can select the types of articles they’d like to see displayed.

Qualified Hardware

Qualified Hardware is a B2B retailer that sells high quality door and lock hardware. Before switching to Swiftype, Qualified Hardware was using a home-grown search solution that was costly to maintain and often failed to return relevant results for the highly specific queries that their customers were performing (such as item or part number searches). Swiftype’s powerful search algorithm helped return better results immediately, and to bring their search to the next level, Qualified Hardware took advantage of Swiftype’s custom meta tags to create a highly refined relevance model, as we’ll discuss below.

A quick search will immediately reveal the great work that their team put into styling their autocomplete with suggested brands, categories, and specific products. The results page also offers the option to display products in a grid or list format. These elements give users a great front end experience, but what makes this implementation truly outstanding is the skill with which Qualified Hardware leveraged Swiftype meta tags to deliver highly relevant results based on a wide range of product attributes.

Swiftype meta tags are a unique tool that any site owner can leverage to pass specific information to our web crawler as it indexes your site’s content. This allows site owners to fine-tune their relevance algorithm and deliver highly relevant results (for specific details about using Swiftype meta tags, see our tutorial). Qualified Hardware used this tool to its fullest extent, listing detailed information for each product such as popularity, whether or not the item is in stock or needs to be special ordered, the product SKU, and more. A quick peek at their source code on a product page will demonstrate just how extensively they used this tool. Once this information was indexed, Qualified Hardware was able to tweak their search algorithm to feature popular products, move special order products to a lower position for general queries, and overall optimize their results for conversions.

Modern Healthcare

Modern Healthcare is a leading source of healthcare business news, research, and data, with thousands of articles and publications. Before Swiftype, Modern Healthcare used their CMS’s default search function, which was slow, produced poor results, and was difficult to customize. Swiftype gave them improved speed and relevancy, with the ability for non-technical team members to customize search results.

Like Qualcomm, Modern Healthcare made their search bar easy to find by floating it in a static header element that follows users as they scroll down the page. This makes it easy for users to always have access to search and begin a new browsing process from any page on the site. Once users begin searching, the autocomplete quickly suggests articles, while displaying thumbnails of images associated with each article. Finally, on the results page, users have the option to refine results by publication date— ensuring that results are from the specific timeframe they have in mind.

These implementations demonstrate some of the incredible results our customers have been able to achieve with Swiftype. If you’re thinking about taking your search experience to the next level, we’re here to help make it happen. To see how Swiftype can work for you, contact [email protected] to request a demo.

For site owners thinking about their internal search engines, the prospect of users seeing a “no results” page is a major fear. No results pages frustrate users and make them leave your site—if a site-wide search doesn’t populate results for their query, who can blame these users for assuming that this website doesn’t offer the content they are looking for?

From the perspective of the site owner, a “no results” page means one of two things: (i) either the website search engine is not powerful enough to find relevant content, or (ii) the website simply doesn’t have content for that query. In both cases, these no result queries reveal key blind spots that site owners need to look closely at to improve their user experience. Let’s look at these two possibilities in detail, suggesting what site owners can do to address these problems.

Possibility #1. Your search engine can’t find relevant content. Modern web browsers are accustomed to powerful search on websites such as Google and Amazon, and they expect the same search experience across the web. However, most websites have weak search engines that are ill-prepared to handle anything beyond very basic, one-word query types. A high number of “no results” pages indicates that your site search engine is built on a relatively simple search algorithm, and it is worth questioning whether an improved site search solution would address this issue. Is your site search algorithm prepared to handle the following query variations?

• • basic misspellings
  • pluralization
  • prefic/suffix additions
  • missed spaces or punctuation
  • mutiple word phrases
  • synonyms

Possibility #2. Your website doesn’t have content for a particular query. An obvious reason that users might see a no results page would be that your website simply doesn’t have content to meet this users’ needs. You may be aware that users are hitting a no results page for a certain percentage of searches performed on your website, but have you spent the time honing in on exactly what these dead-end searches are? Analyzing user search behavior offers site owners unparalleled insight about user intent—by listening to exactly what users are searching for, you can iteratively improve your website to meet your audience’s needs.

An obvious response to a no results query is to create content to cover these blind spots, but this is only possible if your search system provides you with this information. When thinking about how to optimize your site search experience, be sure to think about harvesting the vast amounts of data that a site search bar produces. Consider the following examples of ways that a range of websites might leverage information on their no result queries to drive content development:

• An ecommerce site realizes that users are searching for a particular product that is not currently offered. In response, site owners order a major shipment of this product and capitalize on demonstrated user interest.

• A customer support team notices that users are searching for “change payment information” but seeing no results, forcing these users to write in time-consuming support tickets. To reduce these inbound tickets, a support team member writes a comprehensive article on payment information to satisfy user searches.

• A news website launches with a focus on American political issues, but users are also searching for content on foreign affairs and finding no results.  To maintain site traffic, the company hires a foreign affairs writer to supply fresh content.

Aside from creating content to fill these blind spots, site owners should make targeted adjustments to search results for individual queries by adding in results that they think would be particularly helpful, or deleting results that might be irrelevant.

Because search is a such a natural entry point to a website’s content, it is essential that site owners take strategic steps to minimize “no results” pages and keep users on their sites. For specific information on how Swiftype can improve search on your website, visit our solutions page today.

When a user has a specific question in mind, the most natural avenue for them to discover the help they need is through a search on your help center. But if search doesn’t yield what they’re looking for, it can often be more frustrating than helpful. Below are some of the major reasons why search should be a critical piece of your support strategy.

Knowledge base visitors are drawn to search. Whereas ecommerce sites field more users who are on the site to browse and may use navigation elements to explore a site, knowledge base visitors come with a question in mind and want answers quickly. Search is the most logical way for them to find these answers, and a prominent search bar will quickly provide avenue for resolving their questions.

Strong search translates to significant case deflection. Knowledge bases are unique site type because the information they provide only exists in one place – that knowledge base. While other sites worry about weak search increasing their bounce rate and translating to lost customers, weak search on a knowledge base makes users do one of two things: (i) file a support ticket because they can’t find the answer to their question, or (ii) give up on their question and leave the site frustrated. If your knowledge base has a strong search engine that provides relevant results and fast autocomplete suggestions, users will find their answers quicker and use your documentation to solve their problems instead of filing a support ticket.

Search analytics allow unparalleled insight on user problems. Search data provides a unique opportunity to listen directly to what users want from your site, and  knowledge base managers can look to site search analytics for a number of actionable data sets, including top queries, top queries that returned no results, and top autocomplete conversions. By looking at what users are searching for most (especially the queries that return no results), your support team can focus on creating content that will answer these questions.

These analytics can inform search result customization. A strong search solution should allow you to customize search results for a given query and add in results for queries that return no results. This will ensure that users never hit dead ends on your support page and that the most relevant articles populate at the top of your search results. For example, SurveyMonkey customizes results for all of their most important queries:

Because site visitors expect great search, knowledge bases need to provide a robust search experience to quickly help users find answers. If support teams invest in improving their search experience, both site visitors and site owners will be happier in the long run.

We’ve made a small change in how location attributes are handled within Swiftype. Now you can have multiple values for location attributes associated with one document. This is great news for many of our customers, because now, if you have a page listing all your store locations, that page can now be associated with all of those locations. Previously, to make sure searchers would be able to find all your locations, you’d need a unique page for each location.

Here’s how to do it using Meta Tags:

<head>
  <title>page title | website name</title>
  <meta class="swiftype" name="title" data-type="string" content="page title" />
  <meta class="swiftype" name="body" data-type="text" content="this is the body content" />
  <meta class="swiftype" name="url" data-type="enum" content="http://www.swiftype.com" />
  <meta class="swiftype" name="store_location" data-type="location" content="25,-10" />
  <meta class="swiftype" name="store_location" data-type="location" content="20,-15" />
  <meta class="swiftype" name="store_location" data-type="location" content="40,-10" />
  <meta class="swiftype" name="store_location" data-type="location" content="20,-20" />
  <meta class="swiftype" name="tags" data-type="string" content="tag1" />
  <meta class="swiftype" name="tags" data-type="string" content="tag2" />
</head>

As you can see, there are 4 store_location fields. You can also add the attributes to existing elements if you’d prefer. You can find out more in our Meta Tags 2 documentation.

You can also use repeated location fields with the Swiftype API. For example, to create a Document with multiple locations similar to the Meta Tags example above:

Swiftype.api_key = 'your_api_key'
client = Swiftype::Client.new
client.create_document('your_engine', 'your_document_type', {
  :external_id => 'unique_id',
  :fields => [
    {:name => 'title', :type => 'string', :value => 'document title'},
    {:name => 'store_location', :type => 'location', :value => {:lat => 25, :lon => -10}},
    {:name => 'store_location', :type => 'location', :value => {:lat => 20, :lon => -15}},
    {:name => 'store_location', :type => 'location', :value => {:lat => 40, :lon => -10}},
    {:name => 'store_location', :type => 'location', :value => {:lat => 25, :lon => -20}},
  ]
})

We’re looking forward to this feature helping out a lot of our customers, so please, reach out with any questions or comments.

We’ve got some exciting news: we now offer Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) for our public API. For a detailed explanation, the linked Wikipedia page is a good place to start. In layman’s terms, you can now access our read-only public API using Javascript from another site. In other words, your website can now pull information from our public API for use on that website without using JSONP. We’ve had a few customers request this instead of the previous JSONP method to deal with situations where the request is too large for a GET. It’s also bit cleaner of an implementation, so we went ahead and rolled it out across the board. It shouldn’t change anything on your end if you weren’t having issues with JSONP before.

Here’s an example of how to execute a search query with the Swiftype Public API with JSONP with jQuery:

var params = {
  q: "your search terms",    
  engine_key: "YOUR_ENGINE_KEY"
};

function handleSearchResults(data) {
  // do something with the search results  
  console.log(data);
}

$.getJSON("https://api.swiftype.com/api/v1/public/engines/search.json?callback=?", params).success(handleSearchResults);

And here is the same query using CORS:

$.getJSON("https://api.swiftype.com/api/v1/public/engines/search.json", params).success(handleSearchResults);

(Note there is no callback parameter.)

We hope this makes using the Swiftype public API easier for those of you who can rely on it. JSONP will continue to be supported, of course!

NOTE: Like JSONP, CORS is only supported from our public API, as it isn’t secure to use your secret API key in front-end JavaScript.

Keep an eye on the blog for more engineering features, and as always, feel free to reach out for support.

We’ve released another new version of the Swiftype Search WordPress plugin. This release has two new features that will make Swiftype WordPress Search work even better.

First, we’ve added support for WP-CLI. This is great especially for those of you with 10,000+ posts, because indexing from the command line is much faster. You can increase the post batch size to get more posts indexed at once.

wp swiftype sync --index-batch-size=100

You can also quickly re-index by destructively dropping all the documents that have been indexed (great for development).

wp swiftype sync --destructive --index-batch-size=100

If you’ve got WP-CLI installed (and if you don’t, why not?), type wp swiftype in your WordPress directory to see help text for the available commands.

Second, we’ve merged an open source contribution by Paul Morisson to make it easier to modify the query before passing it to Swiftype. The new swiftype_search_query_string filter allows you to pre-process the search query. Add or strip quote marks, remove words from the query, or add them. For example, if you know that your visitors search for phrases more often than combinations of words, you could pre-process all your queries as phrase match to increase the likelihood that your visitors find what they are looking for.

We hope this improves the flexibility and usefulness of our WordPress plugin for all our users. As always, feel free to reach out for help.