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> it can be difficult to find the sort of queries that produce interesting and worthwhile results. This is a hard problem to solve. I’ve worked at a couple of
by vosper 4y ago
> it can be difficult to find the sort of queries that produce interesting and worthwhile results.
This is a hard problem to solve. I’ve worked at a couple of places that have built products on top of fulltext search provided by Elasticsearch or MySQL. Both companies struggle with the interface - users find it hard to understand, and hard to craft good searches. What’s the state of the art here? Is it Google with a magic text box? What if people need more control?
- marginalia_nu 4y agoI think design of search is still sort of stuck in 1998. The problem is that an empty search box does nothing to tell you what could fruitfully be typed into it. Good type-ahead suggestions can help assist the query formulation a bit, but that's a band-aid at best. You could reformulate basically any incidence of a search engine returning bad results as the visitor entering a bad query. The emphasis has been almost entirely on improving the capabilities of the search engine to interpret bad queries, rather than working with the interface design to offer the user an intuition for what is a good one. Realistically you need to approach it from both ends, but I think the work has been fairly lopsided in search and discovery.
- vosper 4y agoYeah I think I agree with you. The other place I've run into difficulty is explaining results. When you have complex searches and they're excluding or including certain results, you often want to know which part of the search is responsible. Because often searches are long-lived (outside of Google) and people need to tune them over time, but it can be really hard to figure out what to change. IIRC for ES, at least, "explain" exists, but it's very hard to interpret.