A production search system.

What every software engineer should know about search

Want to build or improve a search experience? Start here.

Max Grigorev
Startup Grind
Published in
18 min readSep 12, 2017

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Ask a software engineer: “How would you add search functionality to your product?” or “How do I build a search engine?” You’ll probably immediately hear back something like: “Oh, we’d just launch an ElasticSearch cluster. Search is easy these days.”

But is it? Numerous current products still have suboptimal search experiences. Any true search expert will tell you that few engineers have a very deep understanding of how search engines work, knowledge that’s often needed to improve search quality.

Even though many open source software packages exist, and the research is vast, the knowledge around building solid search experiences is limited to a select few. Ironically, searching online for search-related expertise doesn’t yield any recent, thoughtful overviews.

Emoji Legend

❗ “Serious” gotcha: consequences of ignorance can be deadly
🔷 Especially notable idea or piece of technology
☁️ ️Cloud/SaaS
🍺 Open source / free software
🦏 JavaScript
🐍 Python
☕ Java
🇨 C/C++

Why read this?

Think of this post as a collection of insights and resources that could help you to…

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