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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)

#121

Post by hinkley »

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

I was going to say something similar.

It’s not common, but it happens. For small sites it should possibly happen more. If you’re working hard to achieve mediocrity, you should put that energy somewhere else where you can at least get to good.

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

#123

Post by alserio »

mercora wrote: post #17
rapsey wrote: post #11

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…

i did not know about these[0] keywords so thanks for that :) [0] https://docs.github.com/en/search-github/searching-on-github...

GitHub really needs a feature to skip searching in tests. Or maybe there is such a feature but I've never found it.

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

#124

Post by Graffur »

dgb23 wrote: post #120
Graffur wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it bad developer experience (DX)?

We don't want to be even more reliant on optimizing for something we have little to no control over right? Maybe this is more of a mindset/approach thing. But I like making things where I can communicate the guarantees and assumptions with confidence. Note I'm not saying we shouldn't care about search engines. They are extremely useful and important. I'm saying if you have the type of content that benefits from being…

Yeah, I suppose there are two ways to think about it: maintaining an outside dependency or offloading that dependency completely.

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

#125

Post by remram »

karterk wrote: post #12

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…

A limitation of TypeSense, and a lot of alternatives, is that they don't really work on Windows. TypeSense looks good for embedded situations (ie. inside an app) except it won't run on Windows.

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

#126

Post by jabo »

remram wrote: post #125
karterk wrote: post #12

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…

A limitation of TypeSense, and a lot of alternatives, is that they don't really work on Windows. TypeSense looks good for embedded situations (ie. inside an app) except it won't run on Windows.

We don't publish a native Windows binary mainly due to the effort involved. However, I've heard from a couple of users that they've been able to use the Docker build or WSL to run the Linux binary on Windows machines.

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

#127

Post by jasonys »

forwidur wrote: post #99

Author of the article here: thanks for re-posting this! The article seems to be still relevant to many even 4 years later, which surprises me, given how quickly everything is changing in the field. However, I personally am now focused (and bullish) on DNN-based semantic search. Having built several search experiences based on it I'm convinced it is the future.

Thanks so much for writing this article and pointing readers to the resources. I am planning to build my own personal search engine to reduce SEO spam in my searches, and the resources and concepts here were very helpful.

Regarding DNN-based semantic search, what would you say are the top notable works that one should dive into? What search experiences have you built that you feel was strongly enhanced by DNN-based methods?

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

#128

Post by jajool »

forwidur wrote: post #99

Author of the article here: thanks for re-posting this! The article seems to be still relevant to many even 4 years later, which surprises me, given how quickly everything is changing in the field. However, I personally am now focused (and bullish) on DNN-based semantic search. Having built several search experiences based on it I'm convinced it is the future.

thanks for the great article could you write a followup about recent changes since 2017 and explain more about DNN-based methods.

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

#130

Post by XCSme »

remram wrote: post #125
karterk wrote: post #12

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…

A limitation of TypeSense, and a lot of alternatives, is that they don't really work on Windows. TypeSense looks good for embedded situations (ie. inside an app) except it won't run on Windows.

Wait, so this means I can not test it locally on my Windows machine?
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