Relevant Search

What Hacker News says

1. binarymaxDec 2023
   Love this article. Worked as a search relevance consultant for years and these are exactly the problems we work on. Most of the time fixing search is a thankless job. People expect it to work and when it does they take it for granted, but when it doesn’t it damages your reputation and brand.

   If you want to get started fixing website search relevance I recommend the books “Relevant Search” by Turnbull and Berryman, and “AI Powered Search” by Grainger, Turnbull, and yours truly. Both published by Manning.

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2. binarymaxNov 2022
   “Relevant search” by Doug Turnbull and John Berryman, published by Manning, is THE best book to get started with tuning search engines.

   I’be been a search engineer for >10 years and this is always the first book I recommend.

   https://www.manning.com/books/relevant-search

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3. scraplabOct 2021
   I often come back to the Relevant Search book, by Doug Turnbull and John Berryman. I'm sure some of the examples are a little dated now, but most of the advice and approach is still sound and it's a great tour through all the things you need to consider to build a great search experience.

   https://www.manning.com/books/relevant-search

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4. kirubakaranApr 2020
   > Have you ever been in a similar situation?

   Yes

   > How did you overcome it?

   - I'm able to focus better when I've slept well. This may sound obvious, but realizing this made me go from "Oh no I've damaged my focus by skimming too much!" to "Okay I just haven't slept well today. I'll do what I can."

   - Set aside blocks of time and do one thing. I made and use https://crushentropy.com/ for this. I use it everyday and it has helped me a lot. It's like markdown for hi-res scheduling your day.

   - Once I have clarity that I have nowhere else to be and nothing else to do right now, I'm able to relax into reading what I'm reading, which at the moment is: "Relevant Search" by Doug Turnbull and John Berryman, which I'm using to improve the search in https://histre.com/ if I may blatantly plug my startup ;) (Tangent: Why is search so broken in all knowledge base apps, bookmarking tools etc?)

   - Work your way up. Several years ago, I used to read for 12 hours straight, taking just bio breaks. It was a more carefree time. I'm working my way back up to it. I'm at 2 hours now. It may seem little in comparison, but that's enormous progress from where I was a couple of years ago, so yay!

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5. redox_May 2018
   (I'm working at Algolia) The answer I'm used to provide when people ask me this question is the one our CTO posted on Quora a few years ago:

   https://www.quora.com/How-does-Elasticsearch-relate-and-or-c...

   tldr; Algolia's focus is on consumer-grade & user-facing search (searchbar like you would have on Amazon, IMDB, Twitch, Medium.com, quora, ...) while ES's sweet spot is on indexing billions of documents (or lines of logs) and provide rich dashboarding & aggregation capabilities (like a monitoring dashboard with their ELK stack). Recently, ES released a beta of "App Search" which seems to target more and more the user-facing search bars.

   Here are also a few resources to help get you an idea:

   * from Doug Turnbull, author of "Relevant Search" & ES expert: https://opensourceconnections.com/blog/2016/06/01/thoughts-o...

   * from an Algolia & ES user: https://medium.com/@matayoshi.mariano/elasticsearch-vs-algol...

   * from the Algolia FAQ: https://www.algolia.com/doc/faq/why/what-makes-algolia-diffe...

   * from the Algolia blog: https://blog.algolia.com/?s=comparing+algolia+elasticsearch

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6. softwaredougSep 2017
   Doug Turnbull here, author of Relevant Search. I'm in love with this post. Thought I'd point out I added a few pointers that stream-of-conscioused into my head as I read this!

   https://medium.com/@softwaredoug/this-is-a-fantastic-post-e9...

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