Re:Website Search Hurts My Feelings
by Solvency on Tuesday December 26, 2023 @12:50PM
(#38774000)
I'm not trying to fix search so what's the tldr on why it's so hard to do with such constrained databases? The Nintendo one seems insanely egregious. Is this not just a symptom of corporate laziness rather than search problem complexity?
[ Parent
| on HN ]
The searchable content may be constrained, but the queries aren’t ;)
Search is hard because you need to anticipate and model the language of all potential searchers and the content.
There’s also lots of ambiguity because you’ll only get one or two keywords from the searcher without any other context, and you need to take into account trends and content quality and metadata.
Also, in lots of cases search is bad because the product team either doesn’t know or doesn’t care.
But his examples were about hardcoded filters/facets.
The examples were about a keyword or two (“lentils”, “laundry detergent”, etc) and filters.
He means the last examples about Nintendo.com
The reality is that yes there is a long tail of searches people might search for, but for popular searches like “laundry detergent” you can check them manually. You get a lot of coverage just by fixing bugs from the top N queries.