New and Improved Search

For a while now, some of the most consistent feature requests we’ve gotten from users have involved improvements to Instapaper’s full-text search engine. For months now, the existing search infrastructure had been stretched to its current limits. In order to continue scaling and implement a lot of the features you’ve been requesting, we needed to completely rebuild our search infrastructure.

Today, we’re very excited to launch the new search infrastructure, which is the first of several steps in what we intend to be a complete overhaul of Instapaper’s search feature. For Instapaper Premium customers, the most noticeable difference will be query speed. We’ve improved the speed of search queries by 6x on average, and far better on certain cases. Additionally, we’ve implemented a handful of new features in the search engine.

• Sorting Options : The previous search engine only returned results sorted by most recent. The new search engine defaults to a “Relevance” sort, with the options to sort by “Newest” and “Oldest” as well.
• Title Searches : The new full-text search automatically searches article titles, along with the complete text of the article.
• Exact Matches : By putting a search query around quotes, you can search for an exact phrase.
• Site and Author Filtering : We’ve implemented an “Advanced Search” option that allows you to filter by domain name (e.g., nytimes.com) and author.
• Paged Results : Previously, searches were limited to only the 50 most-recent matching results. With the new search, you can page through all of the search results.
• Multi-Language Support : Instapaper has users from all over the world, however, the previous search only supported queries with English characters. The new search engine supports queries in all languages.

Rebuilding the backend for Instapaper’s full-text search is the first (and most complicated) step in our overhaul for search. Some of the features listed above like paged results, sorting options, and advanced search options are only available on instapaper.com at launch. However, we will also be reimplementing search on iOS and Android, which will bring the full functionality to those platforms.

If you have any feedback on the new search or have any particular features you’d like us to keep in mind as we continue our revamp of search, we’d love to hear from you @InstapaperHelp on Twitter or via email at support@help.instapaper.com. Thanks, as always, for using Instapaper!