4 ms·
I was senior engineer with Autonomy ( before being bought by HP ) and we did really good projects for some big companies, it worked well. Lucene comes a long w
by ccozan 10y ago
I was senior engineer with Autonomy ( before being bought by HP ) and we did really good projects for some big companies, it worked well. Lucene comes a long way, with enough time, some cool stuff would emerge.
But if you need to replicate google, you need bootloads of user data and in generally data to operate on ( i.e. to be able to extract the equivalence of certain terms and expressions, and so on ). And generally some kind of feedback system ( like user clicking a link on a SERP, is adding that question/answer combo a certain boost for the future ).
In short: it's complicated and after 10 years of experience I couldn't tell if a solution is so unversal as google.
- cdubzzz 10y agoPardon my ignorance, but would such a service need to be specific to a site? I'm wondering if there is a business (or perhaps better yet, non-profit) opportunity to provide data to drive something that can be tacked on to individual sites. Would an organization like Mozilla have an opportunity here?
- ccozan 10y agoIt depends. Organizations have different data, so you need a lot of abstractions in order to fit into a certain search pattern (meaning, what are the users looking for). For example, current solutions implies there is a "document" with some metadata. But what is a document in wikipedia or SO context? So is quite hard to get a an answer which satisfies both cases and you end up with cramming all kind of data together just to make a fit. So in the end, you still have to use the google model, of using the URL as a key for (data, metadata). So in this case, just let google/bing/yandex do it's job. On the other side, I saw Google Search Appliance fail spectacularly in enterprise, because the google model couldn't fit and you end using real custom search solutions. There are quite a lot of companies filling this niche at this moment and so I think Mozilla wouldn't make a dent, if decides to enter this market.
- cdubzzz 10y agoInteresting. Thanks for your insight. My line of thinking was on working with "what is the user asking" vs. "what is the user looking for" in a way that could be applied regardless of the information being searched (by, for example, a non-profit with some existing insight - hence the Mozilla thought). But I know almost nil about the space so I suspect that is somewhat naive.
- fixermark 10y agoYou've just described Google search. If your business pitch is "Like Google search, but Google doesn't control it," good luck getting investors.