[HN Gopher] Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Search (2019)
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Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Search (2019)
Author : ddtaylor
Score : 44 points
Date : 2022-05-29 18:05 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (opensourceconnections.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (opensourceconnections.com)
| flappyeagle wrote:
| What's a facet in this context
| djbusby wrote:
| Filters.
|
| Faceted search is a technique that involves augmenting
| traditional search techniques with a faceted navigation system,
| allowing users to narrow down search results by applying
| multiple filters based on faceted classification of the items
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faceted_search
| henning wrote:
| These lists are a great way to produce a big list of strawmen
| that most programmers don't actually believe.
|
| They should have picked statements that are often true or true in
| certain situations so that they are "false" in the sense that
| they are not always true, drawing zero distinction between
| "mostly true/situationally true" and "completely false" in a
| field where the answer to most questions about system design is
| "it depends".
| Buttons840 wrote:
| I think the name implies some frustration with stupid technical
| limitations many systems have. "What do you mean my password
| can't contain special characters? What are you doing? What do
| you mean my first name can't be more than 15 characters?" Stuff
| like that.
| nzgrover wrote:
| "Falsehoods Programmers Believe" posts considered harmful.
| draw_down wrote:
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I think I believe this
|
| "Search can be added as a well performing feature to your
| existing product with reasonable effort"
|
| if you append
|
| ", as long as your existing product is one that would benefit
| from having search added to it."
|
| to the end of it
| cgrealy wrote:
| Very much depends on what "reasonable effort" looks like.
|
| If product management think it's "just point lucene at the
| DB.. maybe a sprint or two", then you're in for an
| interesting conversation....
| Pulcinella wrote:
| Some of them definitely are more like "Falsehoods the
| client/marketing/sales believe about search." e.g. "Search can
| be added as a well performing feature to your existing product
| quickly." Have definitely gotten questions about "why can't you
| just quickly add search" based on this falsehood before.
| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time:
|
| _Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Search_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20039891 - May 2019 (179
| comments)
| tootie wrote:
| You definitely can add search pretty easily and without a lot of
| thought and get something perfectly usable. As with anything, you
| can spend an arbitrary amount of time optimizing for specific use
| cases. It's like how complicated is a contact form? Does it have
| 3 fields and send an email? Or does have 30 cascading fields
| prefilled on user behavior and synced to a CRM?
| binarymax wrote:
| Fun to see this here again. Love the controversy and discussion
| this brings. I wrote it in a good humor and I still giggle at the
| some of reactionary responses. "How dare you call this a
| falsehoods list" and so forth.
|
| Anyway things are getting better now. More people got into search
| and info retrieval since I dropped this list. And there's a great
| growing community out there of people who find and adore the
| problem space. For those who enjoy reading, I'm glad you do! For
| the people who don't, ... :)
|
| Happy searchin'!
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I wonder if there's a corresponding list of "falsehoods users
| believe about how search works"
|
| When I use a search engine, I know I am often choosing my search
| terms based on suppositions about how the search engine works,
| but if I'm honest, I really have no idea. It usually devolves to
| trial and error until I find results that are close to what I
| wanted.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| My roommate's hamster had a porn addiction in his teens. That
| hamster really learned how to use a search engine.
|
| Some notes I found scribbled in his cage:
|
| 1. Never use the onsite search function. It's broken,
| undocumented, limited. Use google or ddg with 'site:...'
|
| 2. Learn all the search operators like intitle, inurl, etc.
|
| 3. Try different search engines. Sometimes one engine happens
| not to have indexed what you're looking for yet
|
| 4. Search for the text in UI elements of websites. E.g if you'm
| looking for a movie made in a particular year, go to IMDB and
| look at the part of a movie page that says the year, then
| search for that particular string like this: 'site:imdb.com
| "Made in: 1996"' you can turn almost any recurring element of a
| website into a tag this way.
|
| 5. Most of the above tips work best if you have a specific site
| to search use 'site:...' So, divide and conquer. Find the
| site(s) that will probably contain what you want and only then
| search for the thing.
| johnny22 wrote:
| i know the feeling. I have trouble getting results I need
| sometimes, while my colleague doesn't, because he types in full
| sentences and i try to hone on specific terms :(
| draw_down wrote:
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