Issue 29  December 29th 2023

Your Website Search Hurts My Feelings

Getting search to work well requires a lot of tweaking and tuning. You can't just slap a search engine into a product and expect it to work well. It's hilariously incompatible with the assembly line style of work that many software outfits employ these days. It also requires deep understanding of what a search engine does and how its algorithms work.

But worse than that, it's more about what the company considers core business and what not. Most often they don't see search as being important enough to the business so they don't invest in it other than having some sort of search available.

Take a random supermarket chain. Their knowledge is about physical stores. Their core business has taught them where to open a store and how to arrange things in it so that they maximize their sales in that environment. It's very hard and it takes a very long time to shift to an online model. You have to find people with the right competencies and the right leadership to convince the company to do this and this is actually very hard to do.

So don't be surprised with lackluster search when it might literally have come from an architect Googling "best search library 2023 java"...Aha! Let's use Elasticsearch!

Evolving the infinite canvas

In the digital world, especially on the web, we’re used to things being stacked vertically. Scrolling, scrolling, through boxes of content, Things are always arranged linearly — top-to-bottom. Or, if we’re feeling spicy, left-to-right. This is all great for neat, orderly content. But what about when thoughts are complex, unsorted, exploratory? Enter: the infinite canvas.