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Swiftype App Search: Using its Intuitive Interface to Implement Elasticsearch

This post is part of the Elastic{ON} 2018 blog series where we recap specific demos and related deep-dive sessions from the conference. From machine learning forecasting to APM to security analytics with Mr. Robot — check out the full list below.

Elasticsearch is successful because it's a powerful tool that’s flexible enough to be applied to almost any use case. But depending on how complex your needs are, you may have to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty with some curl commands. Elasticsearch is advanced — something many users love about it — but we understand that sometimes a quick learning curve can be just as important. Enter Swiftype App Search, an intuitive search solution built on Elasticsearch.

You can’t say that wasn’t fast. With App Search, you can spin up and add a new search engine to your custom application in a matter of minutes. Possibly more exciting, you can start sending JSON data to your new engine right away, no need to create mappings and analyzers. The App Search API doesn’t care how you format your data. Just send it data, and it will do the rest.

Since App Search is powered by Elasticsearch, it also has the same real-time speed. As soon as a document is sent to App Search, it’s indexed and ready for use. From the intuitive management dashboard, you can easily locate, review, and delete your documents. You can even start testing out different queries to see how well your search engine is working right out of the box.

App Search can also be tweaked for any use case and data set through an easy-to-use interface. Visually, you can quickly manipulate search settings to improve your result set by adding synonyms, weights, and boosts, or by even promoting certain results that you want your users to see first. With just a few clicks, drags, and keystrokes, you can create a curated search experience.

Customization is great, but tracking the effectiveness of your tweaks is even better. With the analytics dashboard, you can track search performance over time and hunt down queries that aren’t quite cutting it. With this analytics data, you’ll know which documents to boost, which synonyms to add (or drop), and even which schema changes to make. And if it’s the latter, don’t worry. While schema updates will involve a reindex, App Search never goes down. It reindexes in the background with zero impact on your users — no need to even send the documents again.

Just as App Search can help you improve your search experience, we invite you to help us improve it. Join our public beta and we can work together to make App Search even better. If you like it, you’ll probably want to check out Site Search. It’s like App Search, but for indexing public-facing web pages using a zero-configuration crawler. Watch Matt and Quin’s Site Search with Swiftype deep dive talk from Elastic{ON} 2018 to learn even more.

See what else we covered during the conference in these recaps: