Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What software engineers should know about search (2017)

scribe.rip

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 132 posts

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

#21

Post by karterk »

slimsag wrote: post #18
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…

As a long time lurker of your work, and someone who works on a fair number of search engines myself - I'm curious, how well does TypeSense handle code search (punctuation, etc.)?

Finally added support for indexing and/or separating on specific symbols in the ongoing pre-release builds. With that, I think Typesense should be able to handle code search, but I have never tried to index and search on code myself :)

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

#23

Post by ricksunny »

kristopolous wrote: post #8
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but a good embeded search makes all the diff. VueJS and Tailwind CSS both are indexed, but on those particular site I use the web site search _when I'm looking back for the reference of something I know_, because it's faster and more accurate than googling. Granted, it's rare, but if you manage it, it's great.

Maybe. The point in those examples was that they all solved search in a specific contextualized manner impressively well and despite that people are creatures of habit and they'll want to port the same generalized patterns over that they do for everything else. Not consciously. They'll just do it and expect it to work which is why effective indexing and "SEO" (as in, the engine can scrape the content and crawl around…

From my experience yesterday I can tell you that Zenodo is struggling with reliably repeatably returning results basic boolean search queries. I think I’ll try parent’s search-the-site-via-Google approach.

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

#25

Post by soheilpro »

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…

That's not always true.

I run https://volt.fm and search is one of the most used features. If it didn't have built-in search, I doubt any of the users would use Google instead to find the artists/songs they were looking for.

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

#26

Post by kristopolous »

soheilpro wrote: post #25
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…

That's not always true. I run https://volt.fm and search is one of the most used features. If it didn't have built-in search, I doubt any of the users would use Google instead to find the artists/songs they were looking for.

I'm sure you're right and you've done the analysis. What's the inbound search engine versus your search endpoint as a fraction of each other?

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

#27

Post by mjlee »

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

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

#28

Post by fnord123 »

soheilpro wrote: post #25
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…

That's not always true. I run https://volt.fm and search is one of the most used features. If it didn't have built-in search, I doubt any of the users would use Google instead to find the artists/songs they were looking for.

Even further, any ! on DDG is using the site's search so even if we go to a search engine (e.g. `foo !w`), it's possible that we are using the website's search anyway.
Post reply on HN