11–20 of 132 posts
Github search is a great resource for any engineer. It has saved me so many hours trying to figure some API out when I know there must be so many people who have used it before.
"SomeApiCall" extension:.[js|rs|java|cs|etc.]
Or to find projects that use a dependency you are not sure how to use
"SomeDependency" extension:.[toml|json|etc.]
Most people think of search and immediately think of large data sets, but the problems that plague smaller datasets are equally interesting. It's less about performance and more about relevance. For e.g. searching across multiple fields for a compound query like "taylor swift style", requires breaking the query into segments (taylor swift | style) before searching for the appropriate fields. There are also a class of problems that traditional search engines that rely on BM25 or TF-IDF for ranking cannot reliably solve (e.g. searching on small texts like titles) where you have to consider distance between matching words (which TF-IDF and BM25 miss). Lastly, there is also personalization which is almost always left as an exercise to the reader :)
Biggest 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…
A search engine (and its backing index), just like a relational database, is a technology that allows you to build all sorts of solutions on top of it. Nobody says don't use a graph db because Facebook already has the best friend of a friend solution you could hope to find.
Something completely off topic about the content of the article but not when it comes to the title. Github search is a great resource for any engineer. It has saved me so many hours trying to figure some API out when I know there must be so many people who have used it before. "SomeApiCall" extension:.[js|rs|java|cs|etc.] Or to find projects that use a dependency you are not sure how to use "SomeDependency" extension…
[0] https://docs.github.com/en/search-github/searching-on-github...
A problem close to my heart. Good search is certainly still too difficult to pull off for small teams, and this was one of my motivations for building and open sourcing Typesense[1]. Most people think of search and immediately think of large data sets, but the problems that plague smaller datasets are equally interesting. It's less about performance and more about relevance. For e.g. searching across multiple fields…
Biggest 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…
A free text search on your content via a search input is the killer app of a search engine but it is not the only app of a search engine. A search engine (and its backing index), just like a relational database, is a technology that allows you to build all sorts of solutions on top of it. Nobody says don't use a graph db because Facebook already has the best friend of a friend solution you could hope to find.
But products are constrained by requirements and most of the time the manager thought search was in there, after a little talk, search was not in there any more.
There's resources, deadlines, budgets, contracts to satisfy, blah blah blah. The insight is this costly feature can usually be shaved from the requirements with a little conversation.
A big secret of "10x" programming is realizing "90%" of the work isn't truly necessary.
But yes, search is totally a fantastic thing to do if you have the space and expertise to do it.
Biggest 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…