Swiftype App Search Public Beta Now Available for Developers
Since joining forces last November, the Swiftype team at Elastic has been busy developing a powerful new search product for developers. This new product leverages the incredible power of Elasticsearch and focuses it squarely on providing a set of intuitive tools and building blocks for creating modern, user-facing search experiences. We've named the product App Search, because it can power search experiences in software applications of every kind — from ecommerce websites, to SaaS applications, to mobile apps. At this year's Elastic{ON} Conference, we're proud to be unveiling App Search in public beta.
What is App Search?
In short, App Search is a search-as-a-service solution that simplifies the process of building rich search experiences. We designed the product with two primary goals in mind.
The first was to expertly pre-configure and provide abstractions around many of the powerful, fundamental features of Elasticsearch. This allows us to offer out-of-the-box implementations of the modern search features your users have come to expect: highly relevant results, fast autocomplete matching with typo-tolerance, faceting and filtering, and more.
The second objective was to provide a beautiful administrative dashboard that assists you during the development process and helps you easily customize your search engine for the unique needs of your application. The App Search dashboard allows you to inspect log files, fine-tune search relevance options, and tweak search results for specific search queries.
In addition to making it easy to add search to your applications, App Search automatically collects a broad range of analytics that reveal how your end users interact with your search engine. Using this data, you can recognize trends in user behavior and continuously improve the search experience based on popular queries and other metrics.
Finally, as a SaaS product, the fully hosted App Search infrastructure scales automatically as you grow. Now, instead of regularly investing time in managing and scaling your search infrastructure, you have relevant and reliable search through a simple API call.
Why did we build it?
We built App Search, because we believe user-facing search experiences are incredibly difficult to get right, and you shouldn't have to become a search expert in order to delight your users. Elasticsearch is the clear industry leader in search technology. Its limitless power and flexibility allow you to build even the most complicated search experiences, but that power can also be daunting. With App Search we aim to make that process simpler — making you more productive in the process, and allowing you to focus on shipping fantastic products with great search functionality.
Trying out App Search
We're inviting developers to join the publicly accessible beta and give App Search a test drive. Your feedback is welcome as we iterate rapidly towards a general release in the coming months. You can send your feedback directly to app-search-feedback@swiftype.com.
Now that we are part of Elastic's engineering team, the Swiftype team looks forward to delivering the best technology for developers like you.