Swiftype - San Francisco, CA (relocation assistance)
The product you would help build powers the search experience on hundreds of thousands of websites. We're a product/engineering focused company and we're fortunate enough to be working at a massive scale. Everything is growing quickly and we need more generalist engineers to join the team.
Assuming you are talking about Live Analytics in particular:
One of the most common reasons this was requested was for events and product/feature launches. Some of our customers would launch a new product only to find out a day or two later that users were using different terminology or looking in the wrong places when searching for documentation or support. We are seeing content teams be able to adjust their copy in real time based on the search activity, which is pretty powerful.
There is also a lot of value in seeing a user's search activity while they are still on your website. We use Olark, so if someone isn't engaging with results/etc, we can guess at his/her intent and send them a message asking if they need help.
If I understand what you're suggesting correctly, we already do this. Any analytics we expose in the dashboard are also being leveraged internally as signals for search relevance. Effectively, any search interaction can be used to improve the relevance of subsequent searches.
As we gradually migrate data from MongoDB to MySQL, this code has been hugely helpful. It is making the transition as smooth and efficient as possible. I hope others can get some value out of the gem as well.
This is definitely true. We frequently talk about the real challenge in all of this being exposing the power that is under the hood while still keeping people productive and not letting them shoot themselves in the foot (while changing results).
There are many factors that make high quality search difficult, but as an example, take relevance that evolves over time. Static text-based rankings are a fine start, but improving search relevance continuously based on usage takes a lot of data. Even when you have the data, leveraging it requires careful tuning to prevent issues like over-training. This is just one of the things we do for people out of the box.
ok, so you guys track the clickstream & optimize for clicks that don't help the user. At a per site level i can see where the bottlenecks come in, but business must be good if those are your problems. Congrats!
