A fast and reliable search software
What do you like best about the product?
Very reliable, flexible and quite fast search software.
What do you dislike about the product?
The main API language of Elastic is JSON-formed. This is very non-intuitive, hard to write manually, very hard to remember the quirks of the syntax in various types of queries.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Searching and filtering in a large corpus of transcripts. Collecting some basic statistics.
SwifType search results are incorrect
What do you like best about the product?
We have installed Swiftype on about two dozen of our web properties and liked the administrative facilities.
What do you dislike about the product?
Unfortunately, and this is VERY SERIOUS, we have noticed that the search results returned by Switftype are incorrect. Some of the results that it SHOULD BE including for a given user keyword request are NOT included and some of the results that it IS including DO NOT match the keyword request.
We have worked with their technical support to no avail.
Unless you test your search results carefully, you wont notice this very serious flaw in the product.
Given that creating the correct set of search results is the basic function of this kind of product, this flaw means that Swiftype is unusable.
We are now in the process of converting to another product.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
As mentioned, we have discovered that Swiftype is unusable to solve the basic problem that it is advertised for.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Find another product
Oh, the things I learned!
The Elastic Cloud service wasn't for us. We use Elasticsearch for storing and analyzing the logs for our various servers/services. We could only store a limited amount of logs (obviously), though much more limited than we would like - your cluster's provisioning are linked on memory and disk space, in order to get more storage you'll also need to bump up the memory. I found I was having to bump to the next tier when my memory usage wasn't even close to maxed out. The price of a production cluster quickly escalated to a point where the cost couldn't be justified. I think this is probably due to our use case - so, your experience my differ.
If you care about uptime, you'll also want(need) to pay for Gold or Platinum support. I liked the convenience of paying through the AWS marketplace - but, the impression I got was that Elastic would prefer you pay them directly.
They also, offer an X-Pack monitoring service, which seems useful, but I didn't use, so I can't comment on it. However, if you chose not to use that service, be prepared to roll your own monitoring solution - otherwise your only way to detect problems pro-actively is via the Elastic Cloud web page.
Perhaps I expected too much from this service, but seeing as it is a pricey option (compared to self hosting), I feel my expectations were justified.
Configuration Flexibility was the determining factor.
Elastic Cloud gave us more flexibility and control than the AWS ElasticSearch and the ability to manage it within our AWS market account. Having x-pack available for security and monitoring and ability to customize the configuration for Slack notifications and alerts.
Elasticsearch saves a lot of time optimizing search
What do you like best about the product?
The first thing I like is that it's open source. If it weren't, I wouldn't have used it. Distributed search was another thing which helped me choose elasticsearch. I love the fact that I have control over many aspects of this search engine, providing me opportunity to extend it the way I want and optimize it.
What do you dislike about the product?
Documentation could be improved a lot. Some concepts of elasticsearch take time to learn. Improving documentation and creating hands on tutorial in virtual environment without setup will provide opportunity to get one familiar with the engine and make less mistakes.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I used it to implement text search for products. I could do all the things I imagined a search engine should have.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Elasticsearch can be the first choice. For beginners, it is the best.
Great improvement to our site search!
What do you like best about the product?
Ease of use of the interface. It was easy to get up to speed quickly.
What do you dislike about the product?
Search results did not handle our product #s as well as I'd hoped.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Our native site search was very poor and we need an alternative.
SwifType has really helped with our e-Commerce site
What do you like best about the product?
We like the ability to use the API to customize our search process. The API documentation was thorough and allowed us to get up and running very quickly.
What do you dislike about the product?
We need some better granular controls for ensuring the proper items are returned in a given order. The beginning level does not include any form of phone support, which is often needed to quickly resolve simple issues.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We are putting in many different aspects of searching, browsing, and auto complete. We have easily integrated with our ERP and are using facets right out of the box.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
If you are looking for a solution that is easy to implement with various site solutions and ERPs, this one is right for the choosing. You can leverage the API easily with minimal experience, and have a search solution up and running in no time.
Great Customizable Experience
What do you like best about the product?
I like how easy Swiftype is to use and the power of being able to rank and customize the results to a query so that I can ensure the user is getting the results that will be more helpful.
What do you dislike about the product?
I wish Swiftype would allow me to add URLs it doesn't recognize. For example, I have a few symbolic links or pages with redirects that send the user directly to a system we utilize. It would be extremely helpful if I could include those within the search results.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We have a very active Communications Director and quite often a search will result in a number of his press releases. Being able to rank an admissions page with steps over a press release is priceless.
Analytics simplified
What do you like best about the product?
The ability to check the most popular searches and compare the results with the previous day, week or month provides a very powerful tool on what to improve.
What do you dislike about the product?
The weekly percentage could be biased. I prefer seeing all daily, weekly and monthly changes in the summary.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
As a user, seeing how the contents of the website are being searched and being able to easily see what needs to be improved, for example from the search keywords that did not produce any results.
Easy to hook up and use
What do you like best about the product?
Swiftype is easy to configure - especially setting up the crawl. The Swiftype people are responsive and easy to work with as well.
What do you dislike about the product?
There should be an easier way to search secure intranet sites. That will take a lot more work
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We replaced the now defunct Google Cloud search. Good alternative.
