Comment by gcanyon
6 hours ago
> The difficulties in search are almost entirely dealing with the large amounts of data, both logistically and in handling underspecified queries.
I would expect the difficulty to be deciding which item to return when there are multiple that contain the search term. Is wikipedia's article on Gilligan's Island better than some guy's blog post? Or is that guy a fanatic who has spent his entire life pondering whether Wrongway Feldman was malicious or how Irving met Bingo Bango and Bongo?
Add in rank hacking, keyword stuffing, etc. and it seems like a very hard problem, while scaling... is scaling? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That would be the "handling underspecified queries" thing I mentioned.
Elastic and many others fail to solve this problem too. There are many different strategies and many of them require ingenuity and development.
It’s not like ElasticSearch lacks ranking algorithms and control thereof. But it can require tuning and adjustment for various domains. Relevancy is, after all, subjective.