Searchify

IndexTank closes in 24 hours, and Searchify has your back!

Searchify — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 23:13:28 +0000

As IndexTank tweeted last week:

IndexTank will be shutting down it’s service on Tuesday, April 10th 2012 at 4PM (Pacific). email support@indextank.com for questions.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve helped many of IndexTank’s users migrate their hosted search to Searchify, making it as easy as possible. It seems to be working, judging by some tweets out there. And we’ve been helping some folks new to search as well.

Searchify is the only hosted search running the real deal IndexTank search, and the only one that is 100% compatible. And with 24 hours to go, we’re welcoming the procrastinators with open arms. ;)

Searchify is serving a million queries per day

Searchify — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 21:32:51 +0000

We’ve been pretty busy over the past few weeks with SXSW and helping folks migrate from IndexTank to Searchify. So busy, in fact, that we didn’t even notice that we had surpassed a million requests per day to our hosted search API! The good news is, there’s plenty of room to grow. Searchify is designed to scale automatically as your search traffic grows, so you don’t have to worry about keeping your search server up and running. Let’s see how soon we can reach 10 million per day!

Meet Searchify at SXSW in Austin, March 9-13

Searchify — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 01:48:42 +0000

SXSWi is happening in Austin, Texas over the next week or so, and our team will be around and available to meet! We’d love to talk to you about hosted search, cloud computing, and how Searchify can power your search and give you the best search results possible. If you have a laptop, maybe we can even get your search going on the spot!

Updates: API now available via SSL/HTTPS, and IndexTank migration updates

Searchify — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 04:32:02 +0000

Some users have asked about accessing the Searchify API over HTTPS. You can now access the API over HTTPS for indexing, searching, and everything else you can normally do with the API. The only change required is using “https” instead of “http” for your API URL.

We’ve also updated the IndexTank migration FAQ with information for some IndexTank users. If you’re on a custom configuration plan at IndexTank, we’ve got you covered. Check out the FAQ for instructions on how to transfer your configuration to Searchify.

Finally, our IndexTank migration tool no longer requires signing in to Searchify to try it out.

Even easier index migration from IndexTank to Searchify

Searchify — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 13:23:53 +0000

Here’s some good news for IndexTank users looking to migrate to Searchify. We’ve just released a quick index migration tool for current IndexTank users. To use it, just login to Searchify, go to http://www.searchify.com/migrate, and the tool will ask you for your IndexTank API URL. Searchify will then use the IndexTank API to automatically read your index metadata, including the index name, scoring functions, and whether the public search feature is enabled. Then with a single click on the “Copy to Searchify” button, the tool will create an identical index on Searchify, complete with your scoring functions and all.

Unfortunately, because of limitations in the API, there isn’t a reliable way for the tool to also copy your documents over. So you’ll still have to index your documents on Searchify. This usually isn’t a problem, since you can add your documents to Searchify using the same code you used to fill your IndexTank index – the only change required is to update your API URL from IndexTank to Searchify. Let us know if you have any questions about migrating. And if you’ve read this far, follow us on twitter – @getsearchify.

Searchify is open for business!

Searchify — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 22:43:20 +0000

What is searchify?

Welcome to the Searchify Blog! Searchify is a new startup offering a hosted search platform. Searchify is based on IndexTank, an open-source project that was released by LinkedIn after they acquired IndexTank, the company. When IndexTank launched, CEO Diego Basch described it as “the first fully-customizable, hosted, real-time search platform.” IndexTank quickly gained popularity, and a whole ecosystem of libraries has grown around the project. So whether your language of choice is Ruby, Python, Java, PHP, .NET, or something else, there’s probably a client for you. And if not, the REST API makes it possible to write a client in any language that can make HTTP requests.

IndexTank users

Our first goal at Searchify is to offer an easy migration path for existing IndexTank customers. Because Searchify runs the IndexTank code, it is 100% compatible with IndexTank. This means that migrating to Searchify is usually as simple as changing your API URL from *.api.indextank.com to *.api.searchify.com, and then re-indexing your documents. We’ve been running in beta for almost two months, and several websites are already using Searchify for production. As @719dotcom put it, “Just moved my site search over from @indextank to @getsearchify in about 5 mins. Talk about seamless!”

Why work on Searchify?

The short answer is because I love working on search. I remember when I first discovered the Lucene project, and indexed my first set of documents, and voila, they were magically searchable. I replied to a local job posting with the title “Search engine fun”, and became the first employee at job search site Indeed.com. One day I was talking with another engineer at Indeed about how it would be cool if there were a remote service that let people do search, but without having to run their own search server. We were too busy to work on it at the time, and we forgot about it. Fast-forward to 2010, and IndexTank comes along and does it right. They designed an API that is simple, but has all the features you need to deliver awesome search results for almost any project. Need geolocation-based search? No problem. Faceted search for easy navigation? Yep. Want those fancy snippets that make users happy? Got that too. And one of the most powerful features: custom scoring functions, which allow you to use data from your documents, the user’s query, and the textual relevance to come up with just the right ordering for your search results. Diego summed it up like this:

So you’re an app developer. Until now, you didn’t have a hosted search API that you could try in no time, where you could tweak relevance settings, try formulas on the fly, customize everything and go crazy. You had to fight with open source tools that you would later have to move to your own server, and hope that you wouldn’t run into scalability issues. No more. IndexTank is easy, and it scales with you.

What’s next?

As I said above, goal #1 was getting a reliable IndexTank replacement up. But IndexTank is a work-in-progress, and we plan to continue adding features. Let us know – what would you like to see? Follow us on twitter to see what we’re up to – @getsearchify.

-Chris Lamprecht
Founder, Searchify