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

Search at Slack

slack.engineering

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 94 posts

Re: Search at Slack

#51

Post by softwaredoug »

donretag wrote: post #24
joe_fro wrote: post #2

This is a very informative article. If you're interested in getting started with search relevancy I would also suggest the book: https://www.manning.com/books/relevant-search Which was very helpful to me.

I enjoy reading Doug Turnbull's blog and most of his writing, but I found this book tedious. I purchased it despite reading that terrible first chapter which is available as a free sample. Perhaps it could be that I am already too well-versed in the subject. Any book where you learn at least one thing new is always worth it, so I do not regret having this book in my library.

Thanks for the kind words and the useful critique. I found it tricky to strike a balance between new budding search devs and people more advanced. I may write a more advanced book at some point.

Re: Search at Slack

#52

Post by mahyarm »

scrollaway wrote: post #40
subpixel wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord looks amazing but it's marketing materials says it's aimed at gamers and compares the product to Skype, not Slack. I actually joined Reactiflux on Discord today and was pretty confused as to what I had gotten myself into and why the messages where being read aloud in a computer voice.

Hehe yeah they sure are playing the "targeting gamers" card really well. I think it's kind of obvious they're shooting for far more than that. They're competing with Slack without competing with Slack, it's very clever. Short of video calls though, Discord is essentially a drop-in replacement to Slack. We've been using it at my company, it works so damn well. I moved to it for our open source community as well. I use…

I do wonder when they will make a business edition.

Re: Search at Slack

#53

Post by lacksconfidence »

softwaredoug wrote: post #49

Neat. We've been building a Learning to Rank plugin for Elasticsearch. Feedback and contributions very welcome https://github.com/o19s/elasticsearch-learning-to-rank

I've also been building a learning to rank plugin for elasticsearch, we might want to sync up.

I hadn't set it up to sync to github as it was just internal development, but i've started the sync and it will show up at https://github.com/wikimedia/search-ltr soon.

It's got a bit more of the integration with elasticsearch put together, including storing models in cluster state and a rest interface for managing them. It's a bit more of a direct port of the solr plugin rather than a rewrite from the ground up so there are also some oddities that don't yet make sense. Refactors will certainly be done. It's also tied a little less directly to RankLib, such that i can convert and load in MART models trained by lightgbm or xgboost which have done pretty well in my offline tests and are able to utilize resources on my training machine much more efficiently than ranklib's LambdaMART (although in terms of results, the ranklib implementation is pretty good).

Re: Search at Slack

#54

Post by tikhonj »

accountface wrote: post #29
subpixel wrote: post #22

Slack is great, but it's adoption by popular opensource communities is problematic. Why? Because opensource communities are on the free plan, which limits search once you have 10k messages. I've had experiences where I wanted to revisit a question I had asked in a Slack channel the previous week, and been unable to find it. As a result, everyone burns out faster b/c the same questions get asked and answered over, and…

Why are people using a chat app like a wiki to begin with

Because a bad Wiki people use is better than a good Wiki people don't.

Re: Search at Slack

#55

Post by accountface »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #43
accountface wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are people using a chat app like a wiki to begin with

Why aren't they? One of the great strengths of the internet is that information doesn't usually go away; most of the time, you can refer back to something said 10 years ago with little extra effort. Slack breaks that.

Isn't that the norm for chat apps though? It's not like they're breaking anything... people are just expecting something that doesn't really exist?

Re: Search at Slack

#56

Post by softwaredoug »

lacksconfidence wrote: post #53
softwaredoug wrote: post #49

Neat. We've been building a Learning to Rank plugin for Elasticsearch. Feedback and contributions very welcome https://github.com/o19s/elasticsearch-learning-to-rank

I've also been building a learning to rank plugin for elasticsearch, we might want to sync up. I hadn't set it up to sync to github as it was just internal development, but i've started the sync and it will show up at https://github.com/wikimedia/search-ltr soon. It's got a bit more of the integration with elasticsearch put together, including storing models in cluster state and a rest interface for managing them. It…

Neat! Want to email me at dturnbull AT o19s.com

We store models as a custom scripting language which takes care of distributing the model around the cluster, caching and basic CRUD operations. This was the hard thing to figure out, at first we looked at a REST plugin but it seemed cumbersome and hard to integrate with the query DSL. But I'm curious how you guys got around those pain points:)

Re: Search at Slack

#57

Post by andygcook »

trafficlight wrote: post #18
leothekim wrote: post #7

This sounds like a step towards making Slack more of a knowledge repository and possibly a wiki replacement. One of my (many) qualms with knowledge repository tools like Google Sites is that searching them is basically useless. Another is that knowledge in these repos becomes stale really quickly. If you can put meaningful information in a Slack post, you can take advantage of the recency-focused nature of chat and s…

I've been searching for a solution to this as well. Our Slack holds an amazing amount of information, but it's really difficult to curate that information efficiently. It'd be cool to highlight a piece of information and insert it into a wiki-style site.

We're working on this at Tettra.co. Building a wiki that works in tandem with Slack. Would love for you to check it out http://tettra.co

Feel free to email me with any uestions too - andy@tettra.co

Re: Search at Slack

#58

Post by samcrawford »

danpalmer wrote: post #6

Today I learned Slack has a "relevant" option for search terms. Maybe I should try it again - I had stopped using search entirely because of the results being fairly irrelevant.

My experience is similar. Slack is great, but the whole search experience remains terrible for me. Results are largely irrelevant, jumping back and forth into conversations takes a long time, the UI sidebar has very little space, and if I'm looking for a file it's hard to remember if it was sent as a URL or as a file in slack. Perhaps I'm spoilt by Gmail search, but this is the one area of slack that I think is sorely lacking.

Re: Search at Slack

#59

Post by ngokevin »

austenallred wrote: post #27
subpixel wrote: post #22

Slack is great, but it's adoption by popular opensource communities is problematic. Why? Because opensource communities are on the free plan, which limits search once you have 10k messages. I've had experiences where I wanted to revisit a question I had asked in a Slack channel the previous week, and been unable to find it. As a result, everyone burns out faster b/c the same questions get asked and answered over, and…

That's an easy problem to fix http://slackarchive.io/

Yup. We have a 2800-person community Slack for an open source project. Slack Archive set us up for free, and it works well.

But we still direct people to Stack Overflow since the Q&A is more discoverable there.

Re: Search at Slack

#60

Post by donretag »

softwaredoug wrote: post #51
donretag wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I enjoy reading Doug Turnbull's blog and most of his writing, but I found this book tedious. I purchased it despite reading that terrible first chapter which is available as a free sample. Perhaps it could be that I am already too well-versed in the subject. Any book where you learn at least one thing new is always worth it, so I do not regret having this book in my library.

Thanks for the kind words and the useful critique. I found it tricky to strike a balance between new budding search devs and people more advanced. I may write a more advanced book at some point.

And thank you for considering my reply as "kind words". :) I would not have been so harsh if I knew you were going to read the reply! That first chapter though. So many points repeated.

For those that want to read more: http://opensourceconnections.com/about-us/doug-turnbull/ or really anything at http://opensourceconnections.com/blog/

Post reply on HN