alt Hacker NewsSearching in general is difficult. It is really a difficult thing.
If you haven't felt it, look at companies like Apple, Microsoft, or "The most important AI research lab in the world" OpenAI, for example, their products have terrible search features even though their resources - money - technology can be considered top-notch.
Replies
shortrounddev2 • today at 12:30 PM
idk if that argument really makes sense. A lot of AI chatbot companies have terrible or broken webapps and backend servers because it's not what they really care about. They put billions into their AI models, not their search features. I think the shittiness of their search features is symptomatic of the company's incentives, not necessarily the difficulty of the problem.
I think the reason most companies can't implement a working search box is the sort of work needed to make it perform adequately clashes catastrophically with the software development culture that has emerged in the corporate world (anything to do with sprints, jira, and daily standups).
Getting search to work well requires a lot of fiddling with ranking parameters, work that is difficult bordering on impossible to plan or track. The work requires a degree of trust that developers are rarely afforded these days.