They have an overview video on the homepage. Seems like analytics and ease of use are the big wins for it. For someone that wants no hassle search the crawler looks pretty neat.
I get the benefits of cloud based search hosting, but am surprised that analytics and a crawler is enough of a reason to pay money though. Crawler's are flawed because there's always a latency. if you already own the data, it's much better to push content than wait for a crawler to pick it up at some arbitrary future time.
For someone that wants no hassle search there's always site: from google, but I wish these guys luck and find it interesting how a little feature like analytics can make a business.
It more accurate to push data (and many of our customers do) but most people with web sites are not able to do that. We are working on making our crawler as fast as possible (for example, we just released incremental updates: http://swiftype.com/blog/incremental-updates.html) and paid users will be able to crawl as frequently as necessary.
Regarding Google Custom Site Search...let's just say we don't hear of people switching _away_ from Swiftype to Google Custom Site Search. IMNSHO, our product is already better in just about every way.
I'm curious about your drag/drop ranking tool. Does this create a static or query dependent ranking boost? In my experience, the former is easy, but not very effective, the latter is much more difficult because of stemming, synonyms, partial match etc.
I had to look up IMNSHO :)