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Search at Slack

slack.engineering

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21–30 of 94 posts

Re: Search at Slack

#21

Post by lacksconfidence »

jtoberon wrote: post #20

Question for the author: how do you actually deploy your model? Do you have a dependency on Spark in your production system?

Being that this is a SVM, which is typically evaluated as a simple linear sum of weights, I imagine they reimplemented that in the application layer. Would be curious how they handled the normalization steps (reimplement that as well?)

Re: Search at Slack

#22

Post by subpixel »

Slack is great, but it's adoption by popular opensource communities is problematic.

Why? Because opensource communities are on the free plan, which limits search once you have 10k messages. I've had experiences where I wanted to revisit a question I had asked in a Slack channel the previous week, and been unable to find it.

As a result, everyone burns out faster b/c the same questions get asked and answered over, and over.

Couple this with the fact that channels are not indexed by Google and you get a black box where valuable Q&A content and discussion goes to die.

Re: Search at Slack

#23

Post by scaryclam »

amelius wrote: post #19

Open-source desperately needs more search-tool projects. Lucene/Solr/Elasticsearch are nice, but they need competition, especially outside the Java world.

I'm not really sure what you're trying to say in your comment. Sure, there's a lot of Java going on there, but does that really matter? They're tools and you can interact with them from the language of your choice.

I get the competition part, but none of the above are exactly stagnant, so I'm wondering what you'd like to see more competition achieve.

Not trying to be difficult, just curious in case I missed something from your comment :)

Re: Search at Slack

#24

Post by donretag »

joe_fro wrote: post #2

This is a very informative article. If you're interested in getting started with search relevancy I would also suggest the book: https://www.manning.com/books/relevant-search Which was very helpful to me.

I enjoy reading Doug Turnbull's blog and most of his writing, but I found this book tedious. I purchased it despite reading that terrible first chapter which is available as a free sample. Perhaps it could be that I am already too well-versed in the subject.

Any book where you learn at least one thing new is always worth it, so I do not regret having this book in my library.

Re: Search at Slack

#25

Post by fletchowns »

subpixel wrote: post #22

Slack is great, but it's adoption by popular opensource communities is problematic. Why? Because opensource communities are on the free plan, which limits search once you have 10k messages. I've had experiences where I wanted to revisit a question I had asked in a Slack channel the previous week, and been unable to find it. As a result, everyone burns out faster b/c the same questions get asked and answered over, and…

I have experienced this as well with the Chef Community Slack channel. It is a wonderful resource and it's super convenient to have easy access from my phone, etc but there is so much useful information in there that won't be accessible by others in the future.

Re: Search at Slack

#26

Post by donretag »

throwthisawayt wrote: post #17
isabellat wrote: post #3

Hi, I'm one of the authors on the post, happy to answer any questions.

This sounds like a really interesting problem to work on. Are you hiring anyone for this team (esp those new to search)?

My experience as an experienced search developer is that there are very few search specific positions, if any, outside of the Bay Area. My current job is working remotely for a SF based company, where I do everything but search. :(

Re: Search at Slack

#27

Post by austenallred »

subpixel wrote: post #22

Slack is great, but it's adoption by popular opensource communities is problematic. Why? Because opensource communities are on the free plan, which limits search once you have 10k messages. I've had experiences where I wanted to revisit a question I had asked in a Slack channel the previous week, and been unable to find it. As a result, everyone burns out faster b/c the same questions get asked and answered over, and…

That's an easy problem to fix http://slackarchive.io/

Re: Search at Slack

#28

Post by slantedview »

amelius wrote: post #19

Open-source desperately needs more search-tool projects. Lucene/Solr/Elasticsearch are nice, but they need competition, especially outside the Java world.

IMO this is like saying Hadoop or Spark or Kafka needs more competition outside the Java (JVM) world. Elasticsearch, at least, has a dead simple web API which makes it accessible from any platform, along with a slew of clients and integrations with other tools/platforms.

Re: Search at Slack

#29

Post by accountface »

subpixel wrote: post #22

Slack is great, but it's adoption by popular opensource communities is problematic. Why? Because opensource communities are on the free plan, which limits search once you have 10k messages. I've had experiences where I wanted to revisit a question I had asked in a Slack channel the previous week, and been unable to find it. As a result, everyone burns out faster b/c the same questions get asked and answered over, and…

Why are people using a chat app like a wiki to begin with

Re: Search at Slack

#30

Post by isabellat »

throwthisawayt wrote: post #17
isabellat wrote: post #3

Hi, I'm one of the authors on the post, happy to answer any questions.

This sounds like a really interesting problem to work on. Are you hiring anyone for this team (esp those new to search)?

Yes we are hiring! https://slack.com/jobs/273177/senior-software-engineer-searc...
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