3 ms·

It's too slow to be any helpful

jedwhite 5y ago
Thanks for the feedback on the speed. You'll notice the speed varies a ton. There are two modes here. 1. Information search - average speed for these traditional keyword-style searches are around 800ms to 1s, with a 90% percentile about 1.3 seconds. These are pretty quick although we still have work to do. That's probably 80% of searches. 2. Question answering - this can take anywhere from a second to up-to 24 seconds for complex searches. With question and answering, searches are more like research - they're ingesting live content and doing semantic search on the content, extracting content in real-time live direct from the sources, and then finding and extracting information to return facts and direct answers. So that's something totally different to traditional links on a results page because it's returning direct information (and then showing results beside it). To do this, we give the the questions answering a lot more time and we allocate more resources the more complex the question is. You can see this if you try 2 searches to compare: 1. Information search, say "elon musk latest news" and 2. "why did elon musk open a tesla factory in germany?" The aim of the second one is that the system does the work of reading through and finding the right information, rather than you having to. So you get a direct answer, for me it was: "There are two unique goals that the Berlin location serves. The first is that it is strategic to lure German automotive talent to Tesla. The second is that it is a statement that Elon wants to one-up auto companies from that region." Some of our early users tell us this is the key thing they use Andi for, because when it works well, it can save them a substantial amount of reading and research time. Our aim is to try to support both types of use - complex question answering, and quick information searches. And have the search results work in the way that supports best what a user is trying to do in both cases. It's a similar idea with navigation (go twitter elonmusk berlin, etc). We know this is a very different approach and has risks because it is so different. Also, one really cool thing is that as a user, you can actually control the trade-off between speed and complexity/depth of searching. If you jump to settings, you'll see there's a cool feature where you can adjust this yourself. The default is "Best bet" - it tries to guess how much time and resource to give to a query based on the question asked. But you can set it to either higher depth/slower speed (but much better quality answers), or faster/not-so-smart. Or in-between. We have a lot more to do on this. But when you're researching, it can really help to give the system another 10 seconds to save yourself 10 minutes, so that's the theory behind letting people choose. You can also turn off the complex question answering (Deep Answers) entirely on the setting, and then it will be regular speed keyword searching. Check it out here: https://andisearch.com/settings/ https://andisearch.com/settings/ You can see the impact pretty quickly with asking questions.

Thanks for the feedback on the speed. You'll notice the speed varies a ton. There are two modes here. 1. Information search - average speed for these traditional keyword-style searches are around 800ms to 1s, with a 90% percentile about 1.3 seconds. These are pretty quick although we still have work to do. That's probably 80% of searches. 2. Question answering - this can take anywhere from a second to up-to 24 seconds for complex searches. With question and answering, searches are more like research - they're ingesting live content and doing semantic search on the content, extracting content in real-time live direct from the sources, and then finding and extracting information to return facts and direct answers. So that's something totally different to traditional links on a results page because it's returning direct information (and then showing results beside it). To do this, we give the the questions answering a lot more time and we allocate more resources the more complex the question is. You can see this if you try 2 searches to compare: 1. Information search, say "elon musk latest news" and 2. "why did elon musk open a tesla factory in germany?" The aim of the second one is that the system does the work of reading through and finding the right information, rather than you having to. So you get a direct answer, for me it was: "There are two unique goals that the Berlin location serves. The first is that it is strategic to lure German automotive talent to Tesla. The second is that it is a statement that Elon wants to one-up auto companies from that region." Some of our early users tell us this is the key thing they use Andi for, because when it works well, it can save them a substantial amount of reading and research time. Our aim is to try to support both types of use - complex question answering, and quick information searches. And have the search results work in the way that supports best what a user is trying to do in both cases. It's a similar idea with navigation (go twitter elonmusk berlin, etc). We know this is a very different approach and has risks because it is so different. Also, one really cool thing is that as a user, you can actually control the trade-off between speed and complexity/depth of searching. If you jump to settings, you'll see there's a cool feature where you can adjust this yourself. The default is "Best bet" - it tries to guess how much time and resource to give to a query based on the question asked. But you can set it to either higher depth/slower speed (but much better quality answers), or faster/not-so-smart. Or in-between. We have a lot more to do on this. But when you're researching, it can really help to give the system another 10 seconds to save yourself 10 minutes, so that's the theory behind letting people choose. You can also turn off the complex question answering (Deep Answers) entirely on the setting, and then it will be regular speed keyword searching. Check it out here: https://andisearch.com/settings/ https://andisearch.com/settings/ You can see the impact pretty quickly with asking questions.