> It just means searching over the human-edited metadata instead of free-for-all free text fields that were scraped from who knows where? Not quite. Rather tha

> It just means searching over the human-edited metadata instead of free-for-all free text fields that were scraped from who knows where? Not quite. Rather than the free text search being over products, it's over combinations of filters. These filters can then be applied to produce "exact" results, rather than "fuzzy" results based on textual matches. > why not just use Solr or ElasticSearch instead of reinventing the wheel A few reasons. Firstly, the faceted search in these took a fair bit of effort to expose to users in a way that wouldn't result in bad results (like "blue shirt" returning blue non-shirts, and non-blue shirts) Secondly, these are new infrastructure components that take a lot of work to run. ElasticSearch is notorious for being a pain to operate. We were a small engineering team, only 3-5 backend engineers in the company at the time (depending on how you count), running the whole stack, infra, everything.