What software engineers should know about search (2017)
1–10 of 132 posts
Re: What software engineers should know about search (2017)
#2Biggest advice I can give is you probably don't need search if you're indexable by search bots.
No really. Look over people's shoulders sometime.
They'll just go to Google and type in their search followed by terms such as Wikipedia, imdb, Stackoverflow, YouTube, Bandcamp, Amazon, eBay, Yelp... all sites that spent a lot of time on their search and have done quite a decent job. Oh well.
So unless you really need it for some critical reason where you know your users aren't going to do their regular patterns of going through one of the general engines, close the ticket as out of scope and go home early.
Don't bother implementing hard to do and expensive to maintain features that nobody will use. It'll become more headache than fun real quick.
Re: What software engineers should know about search (2017)
#3Good read, misleading title. Shd more be like "what you want to know if you seriously need to implement search functionality".
Re: What software engineers should know about search (2017)
#4Biggest advice I can give is you probably don't need search if you're indexable by search bots. No really. Look over people's shoulders sometime. They'll just go to Google and type in their search followed by terms such as Wikipedia, imdb, Stackoverflow, YouTube, Bandcamp, Amazon, eBay, Yelp... all sites that spent a lot of time on their search and have done quite a decent job. Oh well. So unless you really need it f…
Yes, but a good embeded search makes all the diff.
VueJS and Tailwind CSS both are indexed, but on those particular site I use the web site search _when I'm looking back for the reference of something I know_, because it's faster and more accurate than googling.
Granted, it's rare, but if you manage it, it's great.
Re: What software engineers should know about search (2017)
#5Good read, misleading title. Shd more be like "what you want to know if you seriously need to implement search functionality".
Yes. If I knew everything I "need" to know according to these articles ... I would know a lot of stuff I never need.
Re: What software engineers should know about search (2017)
#6Biggest advice I can give is you probably don't need search if you're indexable by search bots. No really. Look over people's shoulders sometime. They'll just go to Google and type in their search followed by terms such as Wikipedia, imdb, Stackoverflow, YouTube, Bandcamp, Amazon, eBay, Yelp... all sites that spent a lot of time on their search and have done quite a decent job. Oh well. So unless you really need it f…
I really do not agree. There are many technical blogs that I like and navigating the content on their site is a pain. They will have interesting multipart blog posts and finding all the connected parts requires clicking through multiple pages of 10 entry blog posts to find what I want. Sometimes they will have links between related posts in the blog post if you are lucky. If they are writing about a specific concept, good luck you need to start clicking.
Re: What software engineers should know about search (2017)
#7Biggest advice I can give is you probably don't need search if you're indexable by search bots. No really. Look over people's shoulders sometime. They'll just go to Google and type in their search followed by terms such as Wikipedia, imdb, Stackoverflow, YouTube, Bandcamp, Amazon, eBay, Yelp... all sites that spent a lot of time on their search and have done quite a decent job. Oh well. So unless you really need it f…
Or as a slight refinement implement it as feeding ("site:mysite.com " + user_query) through to Google, to spare your users 2000 Pinterest hits and 1000 scrapes of a very old Stack Overflow question that somehow matches.
Re: What software engineers should know about search (2017)
#8Biggest advice I can give is you probably don't need search if you're indexable by search bots. No really. Look over people's shoulders sometime. They'll just go to Google and type in their search followed by terms such as Wikipedia, imdb, Stackoverflow, YouTube, Bandcamp, Amazon, eBay, Yelp... all sites that spent a lot of time on their search and have done quite a decent job. Oh well. So unless you really need it f…
Yes, but a good embeded search makes all the diff. VueJS and Tailwind CSS both are indexed, but on those particular site I use the web site search _when I'm looking back for the reference of something I know_, because it's faster and more accurate than googling. Granted, it's rare, but if you manage it, it's great.
Maybe. The point in those examples was that they all solved search in a specific contextualized manner impressively well and despite that people are creatures of habit and they'll want to port the same generalized patterns over that they do for everything else.
Not consciously. They'll just do it and expect it to work which is why effective indexing and "SEO" (as in, the engine can scrape the content and crawl around without getting confused) is likely the actual work to do to implement "search".
Re: What software engineers should know about search (2017)
#9Biggest advice I can give is you probably don't need search if you're indexable by search bots. No really. Look over people's shoulders sometime. They'll just go to Google and type in their search followed by terms such as Wikipedia, imdb, Stackoverflow, YouTube, Bandcamp, Amazon, eBay, Yelp... all sites that spent a lot of time on their search and have done quite a decent job. Oh well. So unless you really need it f…
I really do not agree. There are many technical blogs that I like and navigating the content on their site is a pain. They will have interesting multipart blog posts and finding all the connected parts requires clicking through multiple pages of 10 entry blog posts to find what I want. Sometimes they will have links between related posts in the blog post if you are lucky. If they are writing about a specific concept,…
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Re: What software engineers should know about search (2017)
#10Biggest advice I can give is you probably don't need search if you're indexable by search bots. No really. Look over people's shoulders sometime. They'll just go to Google and type in their search followed by terms such as Wikipedia, imdb, Stackoverflow, YouTube, Bandcamp, Amazon, eBay, Yelp... all sites that spent a lot of time on their search and have done quite a decent job. Oh well. So unless you really need it f…
Or as a slight refinement implement it as feeding ("site:mysite.com " + user_query) through to Google, to spare your users 2000 Pinterest hits and 1000 scrapes of a very old Stack Overflow question that somehow matches.
Indeed, there's above board white label options for embedded search from most of the indexers, usually for a nominal fee.
Really depends on what kind of content your dealing with. Search can be as hard as you want it to be.