South African developer company LightSpeed is building an ElasticSearch solution for websites to maximise on autocomplete search features.
Ashley Shaw, WordPress developer and founder of LightSpeed, spoke to HumanIPO at last week’s WordPress event in Cape Town on the newest developments to come.
Launched in May for WordPress.com users, the ElasticSearch add-on searching service became available to VIP Cloud Hosting Customers.
Shaw explained his company is in the process of developing the solution for other enterprises to implement on their websites.
Through ElasticSearch, autocomplete function for enhanced search is controlled through data on the website.
“You access certain content as to define the search words based on autocomplete, based on
Google entries. So you follow your keywords and then build a list of keywords and your input that wires it to an interface and links it to data,” Shaw explained.
The add-on service, as labelled by WordPress, is available to subscribers at US$2,500 for setup costs and US$1,119 per month subscription fee.
Shaw reasons the cost is due to quality of professional developers used with in combination with an outstandings multi-data centre infrastructure as possibly the best in the world.
Looking to sell the solution more affordably locally, rather than the plug-in as a platform, the release date is set to occur before the end of 2013.
“We aim to provide a more affordable solution to South African clients needing more advanced search for their WordPress systems. Our market in South Africa is somewhat different to the United States market in that we don’t have the budgets,” he said.
Launching the development for a travel company client by September, the generic solution will follow for other businesses to utilise later in the year.
“This is going to be a highly scalable system for tens of thousands of data initially, but potentially millions of pieces of data,” he said.
Also keen to improve the WordPress search functionality, the coding expert explained the key role of data in promoting the tool to scalability.
“Hopefully one day the datascale in WordPress is going to scale better because they are looking at reworking the post-type database infrastructure,” Shaw said, relating his knowledge of future plans for the popular open source platform.
The launch of a hostage server environment is also anticipated in August with a new SSL offloading system similar to Google’s recently released SPDY.
“We’ve got approximately 300 nodes on which frontend and backend, they are different so the communication between frontend and backend has to be encrypted,” he said.
Developing its own infrastructure, LightSpeed will make it possible for faster switching, regardless of the incoming frontend device with swift offloading to the backend database.
