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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)

#61

Post by cerved »

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.

but if the search isn't good enough I'll just go to Google anyway but now you've annoyed me with your own useless site search, which is what always happens

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

#62

Post by lessname »

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…

You might be right in most cases (for example blogs etc) but it's just disturbing on apps like spotify if you just can't find the music you want to listen inside the app. Or when Netflix gives unavailable movies as search suggestions.

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

#63

Post by hihihihi1234 »

sriram_malhar wrote: post #57
kiryin wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 type…

Would it bother you if foo.com took your query and send "query site:foo.com" to google? The results would be foo.com specific.

I often find this gives better results. Eg I'm much likely to find what I'm looking for if I search for "(query) site:reddit.com" than if I use reddit's own search feature.

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

#64

Post by mellosouls »

amir wrote: post #29

Not sure who needs to know this but scribe.rip is a relatively new alternative reader for Medium. The original article is at: https://medium.com/startup-grind/what-every-software-enginee... HN's special treatment of medium.com links doesn't apply to scribe ones.

(2017) as well.

Previous discussion from the time, of this excellent article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15231302

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

#65

Post by donkeydoug »

denysvitali wrote: post #24

Friendly reminder to the friends at Atlassian. This could be a good starting point to fix your damn Confluence search

look, if they fix search they might have to stop using "Confluence; where information goes to die" as a tagline... so not an easy sell.

seriously though... default confluence search-as-you-type box is horrible, however sometimes (often ? always ?) there is a more traditional search endpoint available that seems to give better results. see if either of these works for you:

/dosearchsite.action

-or-

/search/searchv3.action

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

#66

Post by artembugara »

This article is incredible.

I've been running a news search engine API [1] for about 18 months, and I found a lot of new things.

The biggest takeaway (IMO) is to use existing SaaS at first. We've been using ElasticSearch Service for our v1, and it worked great. 0s downtime with no master nodes.

And yes, ElasticsSearch itself is just a tool: you'd have to write your own search logic on top of it.

Also, start with something "strict" that gives decent results for ppl who won't read any tips or docs: 99,99% of people who use Google Search don't know about any advanced tips, and still get relevant results.

[1] https://newscatcherapi.com/news-api

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

#67

Post by scraplab »

I often come back to the Relevant Search book, by Doug Turnbull and John Berryman. I'm sure some of the examples are a little dated now, but most of the advice and approach is still sound and it's a great tour through all the things you need to consider to build a great search experience.

https://www.manning.com/books/relevant-search

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

#68

Post by hnbad »

amir wrote: post #29

Not sure who needs to know this but scribe.rip is a relatively new alternative reader for Medium. The original article is at: https://medium.com/startup-grind/what-every-software-enginee... HN's special treatment of medium.com links doesn't apply to scribe ones.

That explains why all the link texts are weirdly misaligned. Do the authors have any input or does it just scrape Medium for content?

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

#69

Post by dotancohen »

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…

  > Biggest advice I can give is you probably don't need search if you're indexable by search bots.
I don't know how relevant it would be today, but ~2005 or so I had a site that used Google search for the internal "search" functionality. It was a webmaster feature of Google at the time, the google results would be displayed with my site's branding, colours, etc. Only results from my site were displayed, but there was a clear Google logo and link at the top. I think that ads were not shown, but I'm not 100% sure.

A/B testing showed significant (I don't remember the numbers) loss of visitors on that page. When presented with our own internal search, visitors would stay on the site the vast majority of the time. But when presented with the google search, visitors would often leave. I would say that the results that google returned were no less relevant than those our internal search provided, in most cases near identical except for ordering.

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

#70

Post by forgotmypw17 »

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…

Third-party search comes at a huge price for me. Crawler bots kick the shit out of my websites, introducing tons of unnecessary noise and load.

I've chosen to block them all and only spread the word organically instead.

I have yet to begin tackling the search problem :)

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