Swiftype site search is fast, easy, and flexible. A great alternative to Google site search.
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Our city website needed to migrate off of unsupported Google search solutions to a more modern and powerful search solution. We needed a site search solution that could index our website and deliver fast, relevant search results to our users.
Pros
- It's very easy to implement. The documentation is great and you can be up and running very quickly.
- It's easy to configure. The web-based user interface makes it super simple to configure (i.e. customize search rankings, edit synonyms, etc.).
- Their support is very friendly and helpful. Whenever I had a question or couldn't figure something old, they were quick to help me out.
Cons
- There is no way to customize the indexed fields of PDF and Word documents.
- It can take a while to index a large web site with hundreds of thousands of pages.
- There is no way to bulk delete pages from the index via the web admin UI.
- There isn't a good module for using Swiftype with Drupal 8 Search API.
Likelihood to Recommend
It excels at quickly adding powerful and flexible search capabilities to a web site--especially if you want to populate the search index via a web crawler. It's great if you want a solution that's easy to learn and easy to manage. But you're paying for this ease of use, so if you want/need a free solution you'll have to look elsewhere.
