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Search at Slack

slack.engineering

41–50 of 94 posts

Re: Search at Slack

#41
post #19

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

Shameless plug: I'm working on RediSearch, an open-source, in-memory Redis module written in C that does search. Not nearly full-featured as Lucene and friends, of course, but it's a very young project. http://redisearch.io

Re: Search at Slack

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been a die-hard defender of IRC and yet, I have been using it less and less since I started using Discord. I can finally have a single platform for communication. Voice chat, text chat, group chats, friends list, async communication, unlimited logs (no 10k max msg nonsense), webhooks/integrations that let me do far more than IRC bots ever did. All of it under one account. Oh and the client doesn't suck, unlike S…

Discord looks amazing but it's marketing materials says it's aimed at gamers and compares the product to Skype, not Slack. I actually joined Reactiflux on Discord today and was pretty confused as to what I had gotten myself into and why the messages where being read aloud in a computer voice.

They're marketed towards casual users but Discord is probably the best chat and collaboration software I've used so far. I definitely prefer it to Slack for professional-type stuff.

You can use Discord any want you want. If you join some popular Discord server, odds are it'll be full of spam and Internet humor, but obviously you can do whatever like on your own server(s).

Re: Search at Slack

#43

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

Why aren't they? One of the great strengths of the internet is that information doesn't usually go away; most of the time, you can refer back to something said 10 years ago with little extra effort. Slack breaks that.

Re: Search at Slack

#44
post #19

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

Take a look at http://bitfunnel.org/, an open-source version of some of the algorithms from Bing. It's not ready for production use but you may enjoy following along in the implementation of a large search engine. The design notes and blog are also worth reading.

Re: Search at Slack

#45
post #19

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

Why do you care that those black boxes are implemented in Java?

There's two main reasons I can see: performance is impacted by the implementation language and because officially supported SDKs/client libraries are usually written, and get updates, in the implementation's language first e.g. Elasticsearch and Java.

Re: Search at Slack

#46
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.

This. ElasticSearch is one of only two pieces of Java (the other one being Flyway) that's so good we use it anyway. Not too bad anymore with Docker, it's a REST API after all.

In the end, ES really proved to be the least bad search server there's out there. The real crux isn't search, it's language. And as Lucene is made by technical linguists (a really rather special bunch) and Java is still universities' darling, it's unlikely their effort can be redone in a non-JVM language anytime soon.

Re: Search at Slack

#47

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 agree. I am dismayed when I see open source projects using Slack in lieu of IRC or a mailing list. It means I'd be forced to use their awful client (which is slow, buggy, and far too resource intensive for a chat application) or use their awful IRC integration. This is all in addition to the issue you raise of Slack being a black hole beholden to a profit motivated entity. Just use IRC. It's practically impossible…

The consensus on our team (40% macos/60% linux) that the Slack client is too slow. Usability around search can be improved as well. To the extent that we've started looking at alternatives.

Re: Search at Slack

#48

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 agree. I am dismayed when I see open source projects using Slack in lieu of IRC or a mailing list. It means I'd be forced to use their awful client (which is slow, buggy, and far too resource intensive for a chat application) or use their awful IRC integration. This is all in addition to the issue you raise of Slack being a black hole beholden to a profit motivated entity. Just use IRC. It's practically impossible…

Or Discord, despite it being intended for something else.

Re: Search at Slack

#50
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.

Thanks! (This is Doug Turnbull :-p).
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