Swiftype forEngadget
When we launched Swiftype search, our staff was finally able to control results, relevance, and more all through an app. It was great. We couldn’t find that anywhere else.
About Engadget
Since 2004, Engadget has exhaustively covered cutting edge devices and the technology that powers them. More than ten years after their founding, Engadget, which is now owned by AOL, receives around 1M daily visitors and publishes more than 150 articles every week.
Search for
Engadget has many types of content across their website—ranging from long form articles, to product reviews, to user generated articles—and wanted to build a search experience that pulled from every corner of their site.
Why Swiftype?
Real-time indexing, complete control over search results, flexible solution for complex database distribution, excellent customer support.
Search getting out of control
Engadget was using an alternative provider to power search on their site before Swiftype, but the staff was frustrated by their inability to unify their massive content base under a centralized search experience. This problem was heightened by the nature of their database infrastructure, which was distributed through multiple backends. What Engadget needed was a search solution that gave them full control over exactly which search results appeared for their most important queries, while also being flexible enough to integrate with their unique database structure. In addition, Engadget wanted to ensure that search results were accurate and always reflected the most recently published articles.
A unique solution
Engadget’s Product Lead Jose del Corral was thrilled to find that all his needs and more could be realized with Swiftype. Swiftype’s web crawler was able to index the site without creating any duplicate content, since there was no need to interact with Engadget’s databases—all content was extracted directly from the website’s HTML instead. Additionally, Swiftype immediately indexes new articles as they are published, ensuring search results reflect the latest content on Engadget. Finally, Jose and his team could drag and drop to rearrange search results through the Swiftype Dashboard—no engineering required. As Jose describes the final reveal, “When we launched Swiftype search, our staff was finally able to control results, relevance, and more all through an app. It was great. We couldn’t find that anywhere else.”
Measurable improvements
After implementing Swiftype, the Engadget team saw a considerable improvement in their website KPIs. Swiftype powered search helped Engadget achieve:
- 18% increase in pageviews coming from search results
- site wide increase in average time on site
These improvements reflect Swiftype’s robust search algorithm, along with the benefits of the precise control that the Swiftype dashboard offers Engadget staff.
Analytics informing editorial
Swiftype’s detailed analytics about user search behavior play an important role in shaping editorial decisions at Engadget. Each week, the product team looks at the top search queries to gain insight about what their readers are interested in, along with the top searches that return no results. When they notice a particular topic or pattern of interest, the product team sends this data along to editorial to help inform their content strategy. This information, coupled with Swiftype’s real-time geographic reporting on search traffic, gives Engadget staff a much deeper understanding of who their readers are, where they come from, and what they are looking for.
