Ten Tips to completely fail building your Search Project

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

@purbon Pere Urbon-Bayes Software Architect

@purbon Disclaimer

@purbon This is not about:

@purbon you or your project

@purbon your future projects

@purbon ﬁnger pointing

@purbon This is about:

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

@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…..

@purbon

@purbon Lets rewind a bit…

@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

@purbon

@purbon WorkQueueOverﬂowException

@purbon

@purbon We prefer rest

@purbon than hard work

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

@purbon Plan countdown

@purbon 7

@purbon No need to manage search

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

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

@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

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

@purbon 6

@purbon Search is a technical problem

@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.

@purbon Geeks at work

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

@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

@purbon 5

@purbon Silver bullet search

@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.

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

@purbon Initial honeymoon is over, and ….

@purbon Boom!

@purbon

@purbon The cloud discontinuity acquisition paradox

@purbon The manipulation plot

@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!

@purbon 4

@purbon Search does not require test

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

@purbon We prefer rest

@purbon than hard work!

@purbon But how should we do that?

@purbon Pretend you are busy few useful ideas…

@purbon

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

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

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

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

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

@purbon 3

@purbon Search doesn’t require UX

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

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

@purbon Hide your search bar at all costs

@purbon Make your auto suggest random

@purbon Don’t show progress

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

@purbon 2

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

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

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

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

@purbon Our objective is…

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

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

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

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

@purbon 1

@purbon No need to listen to our user

@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.

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

@purbon why are you thinking too much?

@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

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

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

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

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

@purbon

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

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

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

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

@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…

@purbon No measurements, no arguments

@purbon Peace and love

@purbon Time for cat pictures

@purbon Wrap-up

@purbon Many options to sabotage your project

@purbon one with 100% success assured

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

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

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

Ten Tips to completely fail building your Searc...

Ten Tips to completely fail building your Search Project

More Decks by Pere Urbón

Other Decks in Technology

Featured

Transcript