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Website search hurts my feelings

openmymind.net

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Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#61

Post by fragmede »

malfist wrote: post #17
okasaki wrote: post #9

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.

it's as easy as

    start -> run -> "ms-settings:display" -> enter
what?

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#62

Post by regularjack »

nateburke wrote: post #45

Fixing this is the promise of enterprise deployments of LLMs, correct? That you can take the list of initial result texts from a shitty elasticsearch implementation, pass it into an LLM with a prompt "you are a user looking for , please use common sense to comb through these results and find a few good ones" and get better intramural search quality. The only other enterprise application I am aware of is applying the…

Implementing search correctly would solve the problem too, without requiring a square kilometer of GPUs.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#63

Post by CharlieDigital »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #46

Feels like there's a pretty widespread problem that goes something like this: * PO: We need search! * PM to architect: Google how to implement search! * Architect: googles "best search library 2023 java" Aha! Let's use Elasticsearch! * PM to Team: Alright, I need a search feature next sprint. Architect googled for 5 minutes and says we should use elasticsearch! * Team: Alright, integrating elasticsearch in a sprint s…

There are actually plenty of non-ES products that are way easier to integrate and tune (and get better results with less effort).

- Typesense (https://github.com/typesense/typesense)

- Algolia

- Google Programmable Search Engine (https://programmablesearchengine.google.com/about/)

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#64

Post by kayodelycaon »

Gracana wrote: post #10

The one that really hurts my feelings is when the search function on a manufacturer’s website doesn’t recognize their own part numbers. Then I get angry and go to google, which gives me unrelated ad results instead. Ah, familiarity.

Having previously worked for a company with this problem, sometimes you need to start pulling other people’s teeth to get them to stop putting data in random fields.

We just told our customers to google the part number. I don’t know how these places stay in business.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#65

Post by eusto »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #46

Feels like there's a pretty widespread problem that goes something like this: * PO: We need search! * PM to architect: Google how to implement search! * Architect: googles "best search library 2023 java" Aha! Let's use Elasticsearch! * PM to Team: Alright, I need a search feature next sprint. Architect googled for 5 minutes and says we should use elasticsearch! * Team: Alright, integrating elasticsearch in a sprint s…

It's more about what the company considers core business and what not. Most often they don't see the website as being important enough to the business so they don't invest in it.

We have gotten used to almost flawless experiences from amazon shopping. Google search finds (or used to) results sometimes almost like magic, etc. The thing is, that's the core business. These companies invent new technologies and have huge teams because doing this is so hard.

Now take a random supermarket chain. Their knowledge is about physical stores. Their core business has taught them where to open a store and how to arrange things in it so that they maximize their sales in that environment. It's very hard and it takes a very long time to shift to an online model. You have to find people with the right competencies and the right leadership to convince the company to do this and this is actually very hard to do.

Look at the categories example. That, to me, screams backend database. The company has invested a lot of money into building business intelligence on top of their physical stores. That organization screams "perfectly curated data warehouse" and I imagine suggesting something like "we need to reorganize the way we store data" is going to be met with blank stares if not full on outrage.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#66

Post by gniv »

dbetteridge wrote: post #6

I honestly don't understand how some websites have such awful search (Like these examples) You can get better results with a 5minute tsvector in Postgres, At least it will show the words you typed in in the results! And yes I understand it may be a different "scale" of products, but do people not test these things?

> I honestly don't understand how some websites have such awful search

Good website search is hard. Funnily in some respects it's harder than web search, since there are no popularity signals a la pagerank. (There could be such signals, but you have to work hard to create them.)

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#67

Post by hunter2_ »

eusto wrote: post #65
marginalia_nu wrote: post #46

Feels like there's a pretty widespread problem that goes something like this: * PO: We need search! * PM to architect: Google how to implement search! * Architect: googles "best search library 2023 java" Aha! Let's use Elasticsearch! * PM to Team: Alright, I need a search feature next sprint. Architect googled for 5 minutes and says we should use elasticsearch! * Team: Alright, integrating elasticsearch in a sprint s…

It's more about what the company considers core business and what not. Most often they don't see the website as being important enough to the business so they don't invest in it. We have gotten used to almost flawless experiences from amazon shopping. Google search finds (or used to) results sometimes almost like magic, etc. The thing is, that's the core business. These companies invent new technologies and have huge…

> almost flawless experiences from amazon shopping

It's pretty good, but there are some longtime flaws that blow my mind, such as the order of results when sorting by price. It never makes sense to me.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#68

Post by renewiltord »

All this is unavoidable. But it's also temporary. This phase of search won't last since we're going to replace it with just SKU + inventory plus some fulltext search plus an LLM. An LLM browser assistant could probably solve this problem quite well.

Inventory will never be well-tagged. The process change to ensure it would slow down procurement.

Ideally, they'd expose an inventory XML list and we'd just use our LLM on it.

The hard part is how to incentivize by permitting them control over advertising. An alternative is the browser LLM just searching across the page (Arc Browser can do this).

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#69

Post by gniv »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #33
gniv wrote: post #26

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.

Sweet! Can Netflix search by age rating yet?

Start typing something like age:8 and you'll get a relevant category suggestion.

Re: Website search hurts my feelings

#70

Post by pc86 »

kayodelycaon wrote: post #64
Gracana wrote: post #10

The one that really hurts my feelings is when the search function on a manufacturer’s website doesn’t recognize their own part numbers. Then I get angry and go to google, which gives me unrelated ad results instead. Ah, familiarity.

Having previously worked for a company with this problem, sometimes you need to start pulling other people’s teeth to get them to stop putting data in random fields. We just told our customers to google the part number. I don’t know how these places stay in business.

I've never worked at a place where part numbers mattered, but I am very familiar with this mindset of non-technical people that basically boils down to "just put whatever you want in whatever text field then act befuddled when the system doesn't work perfectly."
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