Comments on: Search – the best friend and worst enemy of 21st century websites http://www.futurice.com/blog/search-the-best-friend-and-worst-enemy-of-21st-century-websites Futurice Website Tue, 25 May 2010 09:51:05 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 By: Perttu Tolvanen http://www.futurice.com/blog/search-the-best-friend-and-worst-enemy-of-21st-century-websites/comment-page-1#comment-44 Perttu Tolvanen Fri, 19 Mar 2010 16:03:54 +0000 http://blog.futurice.com/?p=278#comment-44 Great post! I fully agree that search is one of the least understood problems of our time. It is extremely complicated to master and even harder to keep working. Google is investing huge amounts of money into it and yet they struggle with many concepts. Advancing user experience of search is extremely hard. Users are also becoming more search-oriented and they require better site search functionalities. Yet there is a lack of decent products and even greater lack of understanding of the problem. Doing a great search is a one key component of a good website. And when search works it is used a lot. Apple.com and eBay.com are good examples. Allthough mastering site search is still trivial compared to enterprise search which focuses into making organisation's own dispersed information findable. But the most pressing problem is also a bit market problem which is related to available technology. There isint many options for building good site search. Google has good offering, but Google is not for cases where you want to customize a lot of things. Kennu already mentioned Sphinx which has a good reputation. Also Solr is a bit more comprehensive package, but there arent many who can master Solr in Finland. Im also hoping that Microsoft's offering with SharePoint 2010 turns out to be good choice for heavier situations (especially if you have the money and knowledge to build your search with FAST). So we need more products and more selling of the idea. Then we probably can also get the resources to design and develop those killer search applications. Great post! I fully agree that search is one of the least understood problems of our time. It is extremely complicated to master and even harder to keep working. Google is investing huge amounts of money into it and yet they struggle with many concepts. Advancing user experience of search is extremely hard.

Users are also becoming more search-oriented and they require better site search functionalities. Yet there is a lack of decent products and even greater lack of understanding of the problem. Doing a great search is a one key component of a good website. And when search works it is used a lot. Apple.com and eBay.com are good examples. Allthough mastering site search is still trivial compared to enterprise search which focuses into making organisation’s own dispersed information findable.

But the most pressing problem is also a bit market problem which is related to available technology. There isint many options for building good site search. Google has good offering, but Google is not for cases where you want to customize a lot of things. Kennu already mentioned Sphinx which has a good reputation. Also Solr is a bit more comprehensive package, but there arent many who can master Solr in Finland. Im also hoping that Microsoft’s offering with SharePoint 2010 turns out to be good choice for heavier situations (especially if you have the money and knowledge to build your search with FAST).

So we need more products and more selling of the idea. Then we probably can also get the resources to design and develop those killer search applications.

]]> By: Tommi Forsström http://www.futurice.com/blog/search-the-best-friend-and-worst-enemy-of-21st-century-websites/comment-page-1#comment-43 Tommi Forsström Thu, 11 Feb 2010 20:49:06 +0000 http://blog.futurice.com/?p=278#comment-43 Like I wrote, Sphinx, Lucene, Google Mini / Site Search or any other indexing, relevancy or search engine do not solve the problem at all! The _real_ problem is not technical. I wasn't writing about the problem of going through a database and returning results based on given criteria. That's trivial. The problem is finding the right criteria. That's the whole big pandora's box that search is. Like I wrote, Sphinx, Lucene, Google Mini / Site Search or any other indexing, relevancy or search engine do not solve the problem at all! The _real_ problem is not technical. I wasn’t writing about the problem of going through a database and returning results based on given criteria. That’s trivial.

The problem is finding the right criteria. That’s the whole big pandora’s box that search is.

]]> By: Kennu http://www.futurice.com/blog/search-the-best-friend-and-worst-enemy-of-21st-century-websites/comment-page-1#comment-42 Kennu Thu, 11 Feb 2010 15:16:24 +0000 http://blog.futurice.com/?p=278#comment-42 One word: Sphinx ;-) One word: Sphinx ;-)

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