softwaredoug

Focus on measuring search quality and methodology first. Be a scientist. Great search teams obsess about methodology. Treat everything you try as a hypothesis, not guaranteed to work. Create a feedbac…

I think the article implies you're a programmer implementing search, not that you're taking an off-the-shelf system and just plugging it in. Just like "falsehoods programmers believe ab…

I’m interested in this question too, but here’s what’s worked for me. Mostly it’s about being completely up front and honest about what you want with clear deadlines for the next step from them for yo…

Talks to smaller groups can be more fulfilling. Lots of 1-1 engagement, and the audience is much more engaged and truly cares about the topic. Real relationships are formed. Sometimes to an audience w…

I think what most people miss for these and similar services is you’re paying for really good, on call, white glove Elastic support. In my experience they can often go as for as to replace having a se…

Strongly disagree One reason google is an effective search engine is society has incentives to make their stuff findable. It’s not just magic algorithms. The perception of Google’s quality is as much …

I’m totally ignorant here, so I’m sure there’s a good reason: why is secure caller id so hard?

I wrote a book for Manning (Relevant Search). It was a grueling process. I can confirm much that's in here. I will say that I generally felt Manning (a) really understood how to craft good tech b…

Lucene: over 20 years has been battle tested, optimized, and improved to the point where it’s running search almost everywhere RedisSearch: new shiny thing built on top of Redis that is used in a coup…

Also complaining that "Lucene is 20 years old" is about the same as saying "Linux is ~30 years old" Lucene is a pretty rock-solid open source project that has been battle tested ov…

In order for me to trust a benchmark, it needs to be a lot more transparent than this - Show the code that runs the bench mark - Give opportunities for everyone to recreate the benchmark - Give opport…

Yeah and then the specification at that level of specificity IS the code. How do you prove the specification is bug free?

Most search engine products, be it job search, Airbnb, e-commerce, Google, etc are going to have a lot of opportunities and use for NLP to understand queries and content.

I don’t think based on recent history there’s any real risk of people not finding a community that shares their crazy ideas.

Open source is winning. But it’s armed by money from the big software giants that want to commoditization software (see “commoditize your compliments[1]). This largely comes at the expense of medium s…

I will just say this was not my experience. In my Arab Israeli crisis class, for example, we were encouraged to see and role play Palestinian and Israeli points of view, as well of those of the variou…

I have History and CS degrees. The CS experience (at a top engineering school) felt fairly vocational. But being rigorously taught how to research, construct arguments, and communicate ideas in my Lib…

There’s a big difference between a patent and a working product

I would say this isn't machine learning, but relevance in general is an interesting topic to apply supervised learning. Of course the training data is the hard part, An article on the topic, htt…

But beware you take on a ton of risk, especially as complexity and size of project grows. Many clients will also divide the price by how many hours they think you’re working and still think in hourly …

Well yes a ton :) And these are the ones off the top of my head... others feel free to list ones I'm missing Books: Lucene in Action http://manning.com/books/lucene-in-action…

Yes you’re right. I missed the “” in your comment and failed at reading comprehension

Yes you’re right on exact matches. For basic keyword searches. It’s not uncommon for search users to want inexact equivalencies, synonyms or conceptually close search results. (Search for cold, get ba…

I work on (non Google) search engines. This kind of thing has been happening for decades. Whether it’s synonyms, entity extraction, or embeddings to capture conceptual relationships, I’m surprised thi…

Years ago open source was about companies collaborating on commoditizing an obvious solution AWAY from the market. The economic case for open source isn’t about value added product companies, but a ki…

I would say whichever platform YOU use day to day. You won’t know if it’s useful unless you are constantly using and refining it. Id also be careful conflating “I want to build a product” with “I want…

“Any degree of usability” Really? I have used ES for years and the majority of folks have gotten by with simple nginx proxies... most don’t need document level security

I really recommend services like Bonsai and MeasuredSearch (I know there's others, but haven't used them). They have a lot of tooling and provide a lot of great support. In fact, the support…