Communications of the ACM
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How the “Frontier” Became the Slogan of Uncontrolled AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been billed as the next frontier of humanity: the newly available expanse whose exploration …
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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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Indeed, there are lots of challenges with faceted search in practice.
Indeed, there are lots of challenges with faceted search in practice.With regard to the three problems you raise:1) I agree that faceted search has a way of unlocking...
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Question Answering
When we talk about search, we have traditionally thought in terms of search results being documents or products. Searchers, however, increasingly think of search...
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Search Results Clustering
Search queries that express broad intent often return intractably large result sets. We’ve already discussed faceted search as a way to help users narrow theirScatter...
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Search Result Snippets
Search result snippets, also known as query-biased summaries, are the additional context included with each result on the search results page. They are an essential...
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