Search is one place where mediocre engineers and even many good ones consistently seem to think they know what they are doing, and they know what is good enough

Search is one place where mediocre engineers and even many good ones consistently seem to think they know what they are doing, and they know what is good enough, and worst of all, that all of this is super easy. The solution, universally, is “use elastic search” (though there’s also the puerile cousin where people say “use the like operator”) but elastic search has never solved search if all you did was learn and set it up in a day. The most important factor is to make sure you weight your results by two numbers - one that tries to score the match of the result to the search string and another which is a more absolute weight (which could be population here, simplistically). Without that search will look like this, and these engineers will always say, “this looks good to me? Just finish typing the city and it’ll give you what you want?”