Fast Simon: Getting fast results with InstantSearch+

About InstantSearch+

InstantSearch+ is bringing site search and merchandising to millions of merchants and publishers, making it simple for everyone to increase conversion with no coding, integration, or maintenance required. Offering a highly scalable platform and self-service simplicity, InstantSearch+ engages shoppers from the first character they type on their phone, tablet, or computer, predicting their intent and helping them find what they want faster, while taking into account merchants priorities.

Industries: Retail & Consumer Goods, Technology
Location: United States

Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.

Contact us

As a small startup with big ideas, Fast Simon needed to bring its InstantSearch+ conversion optimization software-as-a-service product for ecommerce websites to market quickly. It wanted a serverless development and analytics environment that could scale automatically to millions of stores and billions of searches, and provide fast performance to return search results quickly, even on very large product catalogs.

Google Cloud Results

  • Allows Fast Simon to bootstrap development without needing money from investors
  • Accelerates time to market for InstantSearch+ by at least one year
  • Provides fast search performance where every millisecond counts
  • Gives customers access to sophisticated analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) features
  • Enables InstantSearch+ to operate without an IT team

Serving over 500K merchants with no IT infrastructure

Enabling Change

Solutions: Web, mobile, and ecommerce; Turn data into insights

InstantSearch+ is a platform for ecommerce conversion optimization that matches shoppers' buying intent with what merchants want to sell. Instead of investing in equipment and operations staff, Fast Simon decided to develop InstantSearch+ on App Engine, enabling developers to stay focused and productive using the auto scaling feature in App Engine to scale to hundreds of thousands of stores and billions of transactions. To accommodate customers with large product catalogs and still provide great search performance, Fast Simon chose the App Engine flexible environment, which automatically scales apps up and down while balancing the load. The ability to take advantage of different CPU and memory configurations allows Fast Simon to add new AI-based features while remaining in a serverless environment.

"Google Cloud just worked for us, saving us the time and effort we would have spent assembling the right pieces from other cloud providers," says Adar Greenshpon, Co-Founder & VP at Fast Simon. "The App Engine flexible environment gives us a great foundation for AI and higher scale projects."

Every day, InstantSearch+ processes hundreds of millions of events and signals from online shoppers. To analyze this data quickly, cost effectively, and without leaving Google Cloud Platform, Fast Simon uses BigQuery as a serverless analytics data warehouse. By applying machine learning models to the data, it can help customers identify new ways to improve conversion and ROI, such as AI-based suggestions for synonyms or personalizations based on actual shoppers' transactions. For high load microservices in which both cost and latency are critical for its analytics engines, InstantSearch+ uses Google Kubernetes Engine, a highly scalable container management service.

"When our customers ask about reliability and security, our answer is that this is as good as it gets. We tell them that we run on Google Cloud Platform."

Zohar Gilad, Co-Founder & CEO, Fast Simon

Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.

Contact us

About InstantSearch+

InstantSearch+ is bringing site search and merchandising to millions of merchants and publishers, making it simple for everyone to increase conversion with no coding, integration, or maintenance required. Offering a highly scalable platform and self-service simplicity, InstantSearch+ engages shoppers from the first character they type on their phone, tablet, or computer, predicting their intent and helping them find what they want faster, while taking into account merchants priorities.

Industries: Retail & Consumer Goods, Technology
Location: United States