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Activate 2018: Search in Practice
From The Noisy Channel

Activate 2018: Search in Practice

I don’t always attend conferences. But when I do, I prefer conferences full of search practitioners focused on solving real-world problems.I just came back from...

Thanks for the kind words.
From The Noisy Channel

Thanks for the kind words.

Thanks for the kind words. As for how to get your team to approach query understanding, it’s hard to give generic advice. But if you can find a way to categorize...

Query Understanding, Divided into Three Parts
From The Noisy Channel

Query Understanding, Divided into Three Parts

Julius Caesar started his famous text on the Gallic wars with the sentence “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres.”Like Gaul, query understanding is, as a whole...

Thanks for the shout-out!
From The Noisy Channel

Thanks for the shout-out!

Thanks for the shout-out! I also recommend Giovanni Fernandez-Kincade’s posts on the subject, which you can find at https://medium.com/related-works-inc.

Thanks Vibhu.
From The Noisy Channel

Thanks Vibhu.

Thanks Vibhu. There are a lot of published case studies about A/B testing in general, but I’m not sure what’s published specifically about A/B testing for search...

Thoughts about Managing Search Teams
From The Noisy Channel

Thoughts about Managing Search Teams

There are lots of articles out there telling you how to be a good manager. This isn’t one of them. This post is specifically directed at people who manage search...

Real Talk About Synonyms and Search
From The Noisy Channel

Real Talk About Synonyms and Search

When I talk to software engineers and product managers about improving their search engines, the conversation often leads to query expansion, and specifically synonyms...

I can’t share those details, but I can say that geography certainly impact latency when you’re…
From The Noisy Channel

I can’t share those details, but I can say that geography certainly impact latency when you’re…

I can’t share those details, but I can say that geography certainly impact latency when you’re serving from the cloud, especially when you are doing query processing...

Search: Should You Build, Buy, or Borrow?
From The Noisy Channel

Search: Should You Build, Buy, or Borrow?

Search: Should You Build, Buy, Or Borrow?A challenge that many companies face is deciding whether to build, buy, or borrow their core search technology. As with...

Thanks Shawn!
From The Noisy Channel

Thanks Shawn!

Thanks Shawn! I think that Amazon was the first place that I saw this flow, and it certainly inspired my team’s work at LinkedIn. Amazon’s price sort can still...

I agree that the search engine can only do so much to make up for poorly structured data.
From The Noisy Channel

I agree that the search engine can only do so much to make up for poorly structured data.

I agree that the search engine can only do so much to make up for poorly structured data. If you look at one my “shopping is hard” post, you’ll see that my top...

Why is it so hard to sort by price?
From The Noisy Channel

Why is it so hard to sort by price?

A common use case for online shopping is searching for products — say, coffee makers — and then sorting the results by price, from low to high, in order to find...

Analyze This!
From The Noisy Channel

Analyze This!

Product development work should be data-driven — or, to be more precise, data-informed. We live in an age of science, which means that we should use data to resolve...

Shopping is Hard, Let’s go Searching!
From The Noisy Channel

Shopping is Hard, Let’s go Searching!

In 1992, Mattel released the infamous Teen Talk Barbie, most known — and rightfully mocked — for saying “Math is hard, let’s go shopping!” Actually, that’s a paraphrase...

I’d hope that a job description would align with these kinds of questions.
From The Noisy Channel

I’d hope that a job description would align with these kinds of questions.

I’d hope that a job description would align with these kinds of questions. It’s one of the reasons to publish questions — the interviewing process shouldn’t be...

Interview Questions for Search Relevance Engineers and Product Managers
From The Noisy Channel

Interview Questions for Search Relevance Engineers and Product Managers

Technical interviewing is hard, and it’s a subject I’m very passionate about personally.But this post isn’t about technical interviewing in general. It’s specifically...

A/B Testing for Search is Different
From The Noisy Channel

A/B Testing for Search is Different

A/B testing is a critical tool for improving search products. While A/B testing has limitations and shouldn’t be the only analytical method you use, it’s the single...

You’re welcome, Dima!
From The Noisy Channel

You’re welcome, Dima!

You’re welcome, Dima!The best technique I know for encouraging users to enter natural language searches is to promote them through autocomplete. For example, on...

Query Understanding and Chatbots
From The Noisy Channel

Query Understanding and Chatbots

In this series, I’ve focused on the context of traditional search applications, which are the main beneficiaries of better query understanding. But given the rapid...

Query Understanding and Voice Interfaces
From The Noisy Channel

Query Understanding and Voice Interfaces

On the surface, using a voice interface for search doesn’t seem that different from typing text into a search box.Converting speech to text and vice versa is aAmazon...
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