alt Hacker NewsThe idea behind search itself is very simple, and it's a fun problem domain that I encourage anyone to explore[1].
The difficulties in search are almost entirely dealing with the large amounts of data, both logistically and in handling underspecified queries.
A DBMS-backed approach breaks down surprisingly fast. Probably perfectly fine if you're indexing your own website, but will likely choke on something the size of English wikipedia.
[1] The SeIRP e-book is a good (free) starting point https://ciir.cs.umass.edu/irbook/
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I think in today's world the harder problem is evading SEO spam. A search engine is in constant war with adverserarial players, who need you to see their content for revenue, rather than the actual answer.
This neccessitates a constant game of cat and mouse, where you adjust your quality metric so SEO shops can't figure it out and capitalise on it.
What is the order of magnitude of the largest document store that you can practically work from SQLite on a single thousand-dollar server run by some text-heavy business process? For text search, roughly how big of a corpus can we practically search if we're occupying... let's say five seconds per query, twelve queries per minute?
> The difficulties in search are almost entirely dealing with the large amounts of data, both logistically and in handling underspecified queries.
I would expect the difficulty to be deciding which item to return when there are multiple that contain the search term. Is wikipedia's article on Gilligan's Island better than some guy's blog post? Or is that guy a fanatic who has spent his entire life pondering whether Wrongway Feldman was malicious or how Irving met Bingo Bango and Bongo?
Add in rank hacking, keyword stuffing, etc. and it seems like a very hard problem, while scaling... is scaling? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Thank you very much for the recommendation. I am in the process of building knowledge base bots, and am confronted with the task of creating various crawlers for the different sources the company has. And this book comes in very handy.
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> The difficulties in search are almost entirely dealing with the large amounts of data, both logistically and in handling underspecified queries.
Large amounts of data seem obviously difficult.
For your second difficulty, "handling underspecified queries": it seems to me that's a subset of the problem of, "given a query, what are the most relevant results?" That problem seems very tricky, partially because there is no exact true answer.
marginalia search is great as a contrast to engines like google, in part because google chooses to display advertisements as the most relevant results.
Have you found any of the TREC papers helpful?
https://trec.nist.gov/