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What software engineers should know about search (2017)

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Re: What software engineers should know about search (2017)

#31

Post by WalterBright »

mjlee wrote: post #27
kristopolous wrote: post #2

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…

I don't see it anymore, but people used to put a google search bar on their website that would use the sitesearch parameter to restrict results to their domain. It looks like there is a modern alernative - seems a little more complex to get going with which might be why it's not so common. https://developers.google.com/custom-search

We do it at https://dlang.org

It's not the greatest, as it seems to prefer to return references in D forums in preference to the manual pages, but it works well enough.

Re: What software engineers should know about search (2017)

#32

Post by dgb23 »

kristopolous wrote: post #2

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…

I don’t want users to leave the site and use google. That’s bad UX and DX at the same time as it only increases friction and uncertainty.

I want them to believe that if it is there, they’ll find it with search. But that depends on how good it is and how helpful the feedback is.

Re: What software engineers should know about search (2017)

#33

Post by roenxi »

kristopolous wrote: post #2

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…

I agree. But I do think there is some room to look in to the details. It is possible that these search features targeted at someone other than the general audience.

And for something like EBay, or Amazon, they'd be mad as hatters to send any search traffic on their website out to Google where competitors are buying ad space. They don't really have a choice, they have to try and implement their own search even if only a small number of people use it. That is likely free money as far as they view the world.

Re: What software engineers should know about search (2017)

#34

Post by amelius »

dgb23 wrote: post #32
kristopolous wrote: post #2

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…

I don’t want users to leave the site and use google. That’s bad UX and DX at the same time as it only increases friction and uncertainty. I want them to believe that if it is there, they’ll find it with search. But that depends on how good it is and how helpful the feedback is.

Yes, when I'm browsing documentation, e.g. for Python, I don't want to leave the context and type "X Python", where X is what I'm looking for. Also Google searches in that case might give all kinds of irrelevant results, like StackOverflow pages (sometimes useful, but not if I want to read just the documentation), ads, and such. Typing "site:docs.python.org" is also out of the question.

Re: What software engineers should know about search (2017)

#35

Post by totetsu »

mjlee wrote: post #27
kristopolous wrote: post #2

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…

I don't see it anymore, but people used to put a google search bar on their website that would use the sitesearch parameter to restrict results to their domain. It looks like there is a modern alernative - seems a little more complex to get going with which might be why it's not so common. https://developers.google.com/custom-search

There used to be a big yellow blackbox server called Google search appliance that you could put in your data center and get internally indexed white label google search.

Re: What software engineers should know about search (2017)

#36

Post by kiryin »

kristopolous wrote: post #2

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…

I will very quickly stop using a given website if it doesn't provide a good, on-site search. If I'm looking for information that I know exists on a particular website, I see no reason to involve a third-party search engine in the equation at all.

Granted, a lot of sites out there that provide a search function do not necessarily need one, and would instead benefit from an organized, hierarchial index. With these types of websites, using the search function only adds unnecessary friction.

Re: What software engineers should know about search (2017)

#37

Post by resonious »

dgb23 wrote: post #32
kristopolous wrote: post #2

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…

I don’t want users to leave the site and use google. That’s bad UX and DX at the same time as it only increases friction and uncertainty. I want them to believe that if it is there, they’ll find it with search. But that depends on how good it is and how helpful the feedback is.

I think this very much depends on what kind of service your site provides, but in many cases I think we can argue that the Google fallback is good UX. It means the user doesn't need to figure out and navigate a new/different search system for each service.

If the GP's right and people really do just drop out and use Google every time (even though the target site has a search function), then I think it's hard to argue that it's bad UX. Unless you want to argue that the specific sites' search functions are poorly made.

Re: What software engineers should know about search (2017)

#38

Post by sharikous »

kristopolous wrote: post #2

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…

Ironically I use hackernews's search engine a lot

Also Google search is very "fluid". Sometimes, for example for searching documentation, you need something more advanced.

Re: What software engineers should know about search (2017)

#39

Post by mattbee »

Since I didn't see this mentioned yet - I was writing a web search for a client's support data, and wasn't looking forward to setting up ElasticSearch. But I found the FTS5 extension built into SQLite. It was trivial to set up, my client was happy with the results after very little tuning, and it's SQLite so you've probably already got it on your computer: https://www.sqlite.org/fts5.html

Re: What software engineers should know about search (2017)

#40

Post by sorokod »

kristopolous wrote: post #2

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…

"Critical" is subjective but:

* Are Google indexes updated frequently enough to capture important changes?

* If you consider certain search terms synonymous, would Google do so too?

* Are Google result rankings compatible with yours?

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