Ten Tips to completely fail building your Search Project

Search can be just solved by using Elasticsearch, or Solr, out of the box, right? If you wanna learn how to make sure you completely fail at search, this is your talk. Using real world examples we will review common patterns that will make your project search fail. With this talk you will learn, how to setup search ones and never touch it again. If it works for you, is good enough, users don’t have a saying on finding items. Users know what they want, no need to help them in the process.etc. Having this tips in mind, you will completely fail on search, and your product and business owners will never come back to you with complicated stuff to change your search cluster.

Transcript

1. @purbon
   10 (or so) tips to
   completely fail building
   your search
   

   View Slide

2. @purbon
   Pere Urbon-Bayes
   Software Architect
   

   View Slide

3. @purbon
   Disclaimer
   

   View Slide

4. @purbon
   This is not about:
   

   View Slide

5. @purbon
   you or your project
   

   View Slide

6. @purbon
   your future projects
   

   View Slide

7. @purbon
   finger pointing
   

   View Slide

8. @purbon
   This is about:
   

   View Slide

9. @purbon
   Learning how to build
   proper search with a
   good sense humor
   

   View Slide

10. @purbon
    Your boss wants to modernise!
    You don’t want to do it.
    Everybody knows, If it works, don’t touch it!
    Your plans are…..
    

    View Slide

11. @purbon
    

    View Slide

12. @purbon
    Lets rewind a bit…
    

    View Slide

13. @purbon
    Your boss, who visited an elastic meetup, is
    asking you to build a modern site search.
    Machine Learning
    Personalisation
    Natural Language
    Processing
    Deep Learning
    Recommenders
    

    View Slide

14. @purbon
    

    View Slide

15. @purbon
    WorkQueueOverflowException
    

    View Slide

16. @purbon
    

    View Slide

17. @purbon
    We prefer rest
    

    View Slide

18. @purbon
    than hard work
    

    View Slide

19. @purbon
    Don’t worry, we are here to
    help you!
    

    View Slide

20. @purbon
    Plan countdown
    

    View Slide

21. @purbon
    7
    

    View Slide

22. @purbon
    No need to manage search
    

    View Slide

23. @purbon
    First, Let’s Fire All the
    Managers.
    by Gary Hamel
    https://hbr.org/2011/12/first-lets-fire-all-the-managers
    

    View Slide

24. @purbon
    Content don’t need cleanup.
    Metadata is overrated.
    The UI and UX is not worth it.
    

    View Slide

25. @purbon
    They don't want to see us unite:
    All they want us to do is keep on fussing and
    fighting.
    They don't want to see us live together:
    All they want us to do is keep on killing one
    another.
    Bob Marley
    

    View Slide

26. @purbon
    Divide et impera, your search team
    members are better disconnected
    caos is secure!
    

    View Slide

27. @purbon
    6
    

    View Slide

28. @purbon
    Search is a technical problem
    

    View Slide

29. @purbon
    To follow this tip there is only one rule:
    • Search stays only within engineering.
    • No other parts of the business will ever
    take part of it.
    

    View Slide

30. @purbon
    Geeks at work
    

    View Slide

31. @purbon
    What can go wrong,
    if no product people is involved?
    

    View Slide

32. @purbon
    You all know, search is as easy as
    setting up Elasticsearch or Solr
    The domain is not relevant at all
    Understanding users needs is overrated
    

    View Slide

33. @purbon
    5
    

    View Slide

34. @purbon
    Silver bullet search
    

    View Slide

35. @purbon
    Have you ever been in such situation?
    Business comes to IT with a magic solution
    that will solve all existing problems.
    Search (or any other kind of) vendor promises
    to solve all your company problems.
    

    View Slide

36. @purbon
    You don’t know how, but
    the magic solution gets in,
    what could go wrong?
    

    View Slide

37. @purbon
    Initial honeymoon is
    over, and ….
    

    View Slide

38. @purbon
    Boom!
    

    View Slide

39. @purbon
    

    View Slide

40. @purbon
    The cloud discontinuity
    acquisition paradox
    

    View Slide

41. @purbon
    The manipulation plot
    

    View Slide

42. @purbon
    Search is an easy problem
    Get an account on algolia, or get marklogic
    licence and solve all the problems
    Silver bullets are there for a reason!
    

    View Slide

43. @purbon
    4
    

    View Slide

44. @purbon
    Search does not require test
    

    View Slide

45. @purbon
    Search engine testing is too hard, we
    don’t want to do it.
    remember….
    

    View Slide

46. @purbon
    We prefer rest
    

    View Slide

47. @purbon
    than hard work!
    

    View Slide

48. @purbon
    But how should we do that?
    

    View Slide

49. @purbon
    Pretend you are busy
    few useful ideas…
    

    View Slide

50. @purbon
    

    View Slide

51. @purbon
    Logging user queries is not important
    Make your own educated guesses
    about queries
    Optimise for the uncommon input
    queries
    

    View Slide

52. @purbon
    Use very specific queries
    open ended queries are also good use
    cases.
    

    View Slide

53. @purbon
    Non product query terms are not
    important
    Disregards steaming effects on input
    query terms
    

    View Slide

54. @purbon
    Discards investigating query exit rate.
    Queries with lots of refinements are
    nothing to be reviewed.
    

    View Slide

55. @purbon
    Remember, search is not testable!
    everybody should be aware of it
    

    View Slide

56. @purbon
    3
    

    View Slide

57. @purbon
    Search doesn’t require UX
    

    View Slide

58. @purbon
    UX is an overrated field
    The UI will not affect search quality
    

    View Slide

59. @purbon
    If users don’t find results is their
    problem
    

    View Slide

60. @purbon
    Hide your search bar at all costs
    

    View Slide

61. @purbon
    Make your auto suggest random
    

    View Slide

62. @purbon
    Don’t show progress
    

    View Slide

63. @purbon
    Search does not require UX
    Have a search box,
    never think about UI anymore
    

    View Slide

64. @purbon
    2
    

    View Slide

65. @purbon
    Optimise for SEO but not for
    in-app search.
    

    View Slide

66. @purbon
    Have this conversation feel familiar to
    you?
    Leadership wonders how to improve
    user search process
    There is not much of understanding of
    search
    

    View Slide

67. @purbon
    Let’s optimise for SEO, anyway all
    traffic is coming from google anyway
    They actually never ask the
    engineering/product team
    

    View Slide

68. @purbon
    You should not worry, even encourage
    it.
    make search another one problem!
    

    View Slide

69. @purbon
    Our objective is…
    

    View Slide

70. @purbon
    Remember search is esoteric, SEO is
    well understood
    really?
    

    View Slide

71. @purbon
    People will most probably find your
    pages from the internet search engine of
    reference.
    but inside your app,….
    

    View Slide

72. @purbon
    Sadness and desolation is guaranteed
    Users will feel abandoned, high
    chances they will not come back.
    

    View Slide

73. @purbon
    If you are here, you probably have
    completed a few of previous tips very
    well.
    Good Job! only one left!
    

    View Slide

74. @purbon
    1
    

    View Slide

75. @purbon
    No need to listen to our user
    

    View Slide

76. @purbon
    Stage for this tip:
    You have a working search function in
    your app.
    You might be wondering, what are next
    steps to improve it.
    

    View Slide

77. @purbon
    If you are having such thoughts now,
    please….
    

    View Slide

78. @purbon
    why are you thinking too much?
    

    View Slide

79. @purbon
    But if you insist, or are forced to, improve
    your search
    This is a critical tip to sabotage all the
    search efforts
    Never listen to your users
    

    View Slide

80. @purbon
    No logs generated from your search
    Remember a common excuse, there is
    never time for that
    

    View Slide

81. @purbon
    No user feedback gathered from the UI
    Too hard to get it done!
    You can always play the GDPR card
    

    View Slide

82. @purbon
    Remember if you ask your users, they
    might tell you where search is not
    good, and you might be ask to fix it.
    

    View Slide

83. @purbon
    There is absolutely no
    need to deal with
    language
    This only apply if you have multi-language content
    

    View Slide

84. @purbon
    

    View Slide

85. @purbon
    Handling language is hard
    You should only care about English
    why should you bother about the rest…
    

    View Slide

86. @purbon
    Stemming is just introducing problems,
    for example:
    Word Stem
    console consol
    consoled consol
    

    View Slide

87. @purbon
    Don’t even think about phonetics, or
    other esoteric methods
    

    View Slide

88. @purbon
    There is absolutely no
    need to experiment
    This only apply if are really curious to improve
    

    View Slide

89. @purbon
    Improvements are thrown to users
    without caring much
    No metric or a/b test is run to check if
    the algorithm has improved
    remember…
    

    View Slide

90. @purbon
    No measurements, no
    arguments
    

    View Slide

91. @purbon
    Peace and love
    

    View Slide

92. @purbon
    Time for cat pictures
    

    View Slide

93. @purbon
    Wrap-up
    

    View Slide

94. @purbon
    Many options to
    sabotage your project
    

    View Slide

95. @purbon
    one with 100%
    success assured
    

    View Slide

96. @purbon
    You should not care about
    your users, if you have
    content they will find it!!
    

    View Slide

97. Presented sabotage tips
    1. No need to listen to our users
    2. Optimise for SEO
    3. Search does not require UX
    4. Search does not need tests
    5. Silver bullet search
    6. Search is a technical problem
    7. No need to manage search
    

    View Slide

98. @purbon
    Thanks a lot! Questions?
    disagreements? threads?
    Pere Urbon-Bayes
    Data Wrangler
    pere.urbon@{gmail.com, acm.org}
    

    View Slide