Crawl and search your Drupal site with Swiftype (Elastic Site Search)

While Drupal provides excellent search capabilities using Search API and backend modules with Solr, Elasticsearch and Database search, they might become challenging to setup or maintain, especially when it comes to understanding your search analytics, using autocomplete, or customizing weighting or pinned items.

Swiftype (ESS) is a SaaS solution build on top of Elasticsearch that provides an all-in-one experience for simple site search, as well as more advanced use-cases with facets and filters.

With Swiftype you can crawl your site and let it index all your pages with all the content, metadata, and additional fields if configured, and search it using a simple javascript widget on your site. Alternatively, you can use REST API to search for same data if you'd like to build your own UI.

We'll look at some advantages Swiftype has to offer, like search results ranking, analytics, autocomplete, boosting, logs and suggestions that would improve the quality of your search and give your marketing team control back over the search experience.

We'll also cover ways to use Swiftype with Drupal's own Search API for indexing content instead of crawling for intranet or closed sites experience and using Search API and Views to search Swiftype index and feed in the search results in Drupal's render pipeline instead of embedding a javascript widget.