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> When you use a service with good search that just works, chances are that there's been a lot of engineer hours devoted to identifying exactly which signals ar

> When you use a service with good search that just works, chances are that there's been a lot of engineer hours devoted to identifying exactly which signals are most useful in your corpus I imagine at a place like Google, your "corpus" is just about everything under the sun, as are your queries. (i.e. less chance for a subject-specific tuning) What happens then?

nostrademons 9y ago
Google's search departments were for years organized by the type of content being indexed, i.e. Web Search, Image Search, Video Search, Product Search, Book Search, Blog Search, Discussion Search (RIP), Google News, Scholar, etc. For a long time these distinctions were apparent in the UI (they were de-emphasized after I left, which IMHO was a very good thing), but the differences go way down through the search stack, with different indexes, different ranking functions, and in some cases different ingestion mechanisms. As for what happens when these become inadequate for the queries users ask...well, buy Metaweb and rebrand it as the Knowledge Graph. ;-)
mayank 9y ago
> I imagine at a place like Google, your "corpus" is just about everything under the sun, as are your queries. > What happens then? You accept the fact that a good search engine is inevitably going to be a multi-layered beast that requires constant effort to improve, with heuristics, machine learning, magic constants, special lists of words, and regular expressions. After that, it's just a matter of picking a commercially useful objective function ("instant search", "query autocomplete", "maximize user satisfaction") and pointing large teams of well-resourced PhDs at it. Probably a whole weekend at least.
garysieling 9y ago
If you can identify categories of queries or documents that interest people, you can treat tuning that part of the search engine as if it was a new product.

nostrademons 9y ago

Google's search departments were for years organized by the type of content being indexed, i.e. Web Search, Image Search, Video Search, Product Search, Book Search, Blog Search, Discussion Search (RIP), Google News, Scholar, etc. For a long time these distinctions were apparent in the UI (they were de-emphasized after I left, which IMHO was a very good thing), but the differences go way down through the search stack, with different indexes, different ranking functions, and in some cases different ingestion mechanisms. As for what happens when these become inadequate for the queries users ask...well, buy Metaweb and rebrand it as the Knowledge Graph. ;-)

mayank 9y ago

> I imagine at a place like Google, your "corpus" is just about everything under the sun, as are your queries. > What happens then? You accept the fact that a good search engine is inevitably going to be a multi-layered beast that requires constant effort to improve, with heuristics, machine learning, magic constants, special lists of words, and regular expressions. After that, it's just a matter of picking a commercially useful objective function ("instant search", "query autocomplete", "maximize user satisfaction") and pointing large teams of well-resourced PhDs at it. Probably a whole weekend at least.

garysieling 9y ago

If you can identify categories of queries or documents that interest people, you can treat tuning that part of the search engine as if it was a new product.