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Ten Tips to completely fail building your Search Project

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.

Pere Urbón

April 25, 2018
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  1. @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…..
  2. @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
  3. @purbon First, Let’s Fire All the Managers. by Gary Hamel

    https://hbr.org/2011/12/first-lets-fire-all-the-managers
  4. @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
  5. @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.
  6. @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
  7. @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.
  8. @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!
  9. @purbon Logging user queries is not important Make your own

    educated guesses about queries Optimise for the uncommon input queries
  10. @purbon Have this conversation feel familiar to you? Leadership wonders

    how to improve user search process There is not much of understanding of search
  11. @purbon Let’s optimise for SEO, anyway all traffic is coming

    from google anyway They actually never ask the engineering/product team
  12. @purbon People will most probably find your pages from the

    internet search engine of reference. but inside your app,….
  13. @purbon If you are here, you probably have completed a

    few of previous tips very well. Good Job! only one left!
  14. @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.
  15. @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
  16. @purbon No user feedback gathered from the UI Too hard

    to get it done! You can always play the GDPR card
  17. @purbon Remember if you ask your users, they might tell

    you where search is not good, and you might be ask to fix it.
  18. @purbon There is absolutely no need to deal with language

    This only apply if you have multi-language content
  19. @purbon Handling language is hard You should only care about

    English why should you bother about the rest…
  20. @purbon There is absolutely no need to experiment This only

    apply if are really curious to improve
  21. @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…
  22. @purbon You should not care about your users, if you

    have content they will find it!!
  23. 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