21–30 of 201 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not disagreeing, but this example seems like a data/tagging problem which is probably some other department.
Data tagging makes Walmart throw a huge banner ad for pancakes into your search for lentils?
Vaguely related but Firefox on android history search (well, autocomplete) is awful. n -> suggests nothing ne -> suggests news.ycombinator.com new -> suggests news.ycombinator.com news -> suggests nothing news. -> suggests nothing news.y -> suggests nothing news.yc -> suggests nothing news.yco -> suggests nothing news.ycom -> suggests nothing news.ycomb -> suggests nothing news.ycombi -> suggests nothing news.ycombin…
If heads of product were forced to use their own products for a full afternoon every week the quality of the web would increase a lot. The amount of high level product people that can't demo their own product and cannot find features they hype up in slide decks is depressing.
Vaguely related but Firefox on android history search (well, autocomplete) is awful. n -> suggests nothing ne -> suggests news.ycombinator.com new -> suggests news.ycombinator.com news -> suggests nothing news. -> suggests nothing news.y -> suggests nothing news.yc -> suggests nothing news.yco -> suggests nothing news.ycom -> suggests nothing news.ycomb -> suggests nothing news.ycombi -> suggests nothing news.ycombin…
The worst offender of this practice has to be the windows start menu. Even when you fully type the executable name, it can show up below the fold under unrelated results. Just try to get to display settings on windows these days through the start menu.
Even web search sucks now
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do not understand this phenomenon where search boxes will stop presenting the phrase you want, after you’ve typed the next letter in the word. new -> suggests news.ycombinator.com news -> suggests nothing How does this happen? It is bizarre, it is the most frustrating little thing I can think of in computers, at least since USB became flip-able.
There is a logic, you type "n" and "news.yc[...].com" comes up, so when you type "ne" then you're presumably (the logic goes) looking for something other than the website that was just presented to you; otherwise you would have chosen that website already rather than continuing to search by adding more letters. In practice people type what they think will turn up the results "news", say, and don't look at the results…
Another annoying aspect to it is that things enter your history as you browse, so the number of characters to hit that point where it shows what you want might shift around. Which totally destroys muscle memory. This isn’t the browser’s fault of course, but it would be nice if they could design around it.
Vaguely related but Firefox on android history search (well, autocomplete) is awful. n -> suggests nothing ne -> suggests news.ycombinator.com new -> suggests news.ycombinator.com news -> suggests nothing news. -> suggests nothing news.y -> suggests nothing news.yc -> suggests nothing news.yco -> suggests nothing news.ycom -> suggests nothing news.ycomb -> suggests nothing news.ycombi -> suggests nothing news.ycombin…
I do not understand this phenomenon where search boxes will stop presenting the phrase you want, after you’ve typed the next letter in the word. new -> suggests news.ycombinator.com news -> suggests nothing How does this happen? It is bizarre, it is the most frustrating little thing I can think of in computers, at least since USB became flip-able.
a, ad, adv -> first result is adventofcode.com/2023
adve -> first result is adventofcode.com/2023/day/1 [honestly, this one baffles me, but I guess I went back to day 1 at some point after typing `adve`]
adven, advent, advento -> first result is reddit.com/r/adventofcode
adventof -> back to adventofcode.com/2023
I actually *appreciate* this behavior; it means I can better muscle-memory a certain number of letters and go down to the first result when 2 sites have similar names (very annoying for twitter & twitch btw).
So I don't think the problem is that weights can change as you type more letters; but that an entry can disappear altogether when there are no other suggestions.
I've never been lucky(?) enough to reach a scale or level of domain messiness where the standard method of indexing things naievely in elasticsearch or even typesense breaks down. Especially to such an extent as the umbrella example. What's the failure mode here? Microservices that "own their own data"?
Fuzzy matching and boosting often trip people up or lead to folks shooting themselves in the foot relevancy-wise.
If you want really great results, you need to spend the time crafting your query, dealing with synonyms ("pop" vs. "soda"), stemming, typos, negative boosts ("non-alcoholic", in the example) etc.
It's not necessarily hard, just often forgotten or not included in the initial scope.
On the other end of the spectrum, I've been impressed by Netflix search. I would search a name and they do not have that movie, but would suggest a mix of similar movies, movies with the same actors or director. It's pretty clever, I just wish they were more explicit about it, as in showing the reasoning behind choosing a result.