Why Enterprise Search Remains a Problem

August 8, 2020

I read “Let’s Build a Full-Text Search Engine.” The write up does a reasonable job of walking through the basics of building a search engine. The focus is full text search, but I think in terms of an organization and its content. As a result, the system summarized will not handle video, images, and other types of content. The code examples are clear, and I liked the straightforward approach.

However, there is a potential bump in the information superhighway. Here’s a Venn diagram from the article. Notice the work you have to do to find documents with small, wild cat?

image

If I search for “smith”, “order”, “tile” — I want only the documents in which the Boolean AND is applied by default. I want Smith’s orders for tile. I have to call the person. I don’t want to go on scavenger hunt. (There are other minor nits too, but the AND’ing thing is huge to me.)

Stephen E Arnold, August 6, 2020

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