Search Quality

In the follow-up episode of Vector Podcast Live series, I’ve interviewed Grant Ingersoll — Fractional CTO, Leading Search Consultant, co-founder of Lucidworks, former CTO of Wikimedia. Grant took the engineering stance of evolving a search engine. We discussed some fascinating topics, like how to nurture intuition in building search engine…

Note: This article was written and originally published in October 2016. I have reviewed and refreshed the content to reflect changes with the tools used in this article in 2020. The source code and data used and mentioned in this article are available from https://github.com/wyswilson/jobsearch-engine Good search is about ensuring…

I visited a cat shelter one day with the intention to adopt a few cats. The shelter had 50 cats; 25 of them were black, 10 were brown and 15 whites. The shelter worker was colour blind but he had some other techniques to distinguish the colour of the cats…

We have spoken about the fact that relevance is subjective. However, this does not mean that lines need not be drawn. In the area of search, there are generally two approaches of bringing results back given a user query. The first one, which partitions the entire collection into relevant versus…

A previous post on retrieval, precision and recall discussed the distinction between the three important concepts in search. In another post, we described the two main approaches for retrieval, and saw that, for faceted search, retrieval with high precision is the foundation for a good search experience. In other words…

Search is an empirical field of work. What this means is that we make headway in what we do through the analysis of observations, experiences and then acting on the findings. To illustrate this; consider you have just prepared green curry for the first time and you plan to sell…

And it is especially true in the case of online search products. In a previous article, we discussed why figuring out and using proper metrics that are aligned with customer outcomes is important. In this article, we explore the traits of metrics which are fit for purpose. …

We actively seek out information for all sorts of reasons. The role of a good search engine is to understand intent on the fly and attempt to serve up information that aligns with the intent. The approach to deciding which results to bring back (i.e., retrieval) and the order in…

One day, the owner of a Thai restaurant has to make a decision on whether he should continue making his own paste or use pre-made paste from the supermarket for the green curry dishes on the menu. He devised an experiment to help him decide. …