We just added a subscriber search box to the Dashboard:
Sounds kinda simple, but it was a pretty serious undertaking behind the scenes. See, before making search so easily accessible, we wanted to really beef up our underlying search service to make it faster. And that’s not an easy task when you consider the fact that we have a ton of small users with small subscriber lists (in the hundreds), and a bunch of large users with ginormous lists (in the millions). The fact that we built MailChimp to scale along with customers as they grow from startup to gigantic corporations has always been our most difficult challenge, but also our best differentiator. Would’ve been a lot easier to choose a database architecture if we just focused on small business or enterprise. Building the app to serve both (plus everything in between) makes things more–interesting. Anyway, in the end we had to build an entirely new search service, and then move 500GB of raw text data, 2 billion records, and 1TB of clustered, indexed search data.
So what can you do with all that power? Well let’s say I want to find all the people named “Ben” across all my lists, because I want to tell them about BenConf, a tech event for people named Ben (I’m serious).
I can just type “ben” in the Dashboard, and BAM: