Experienced Devs

4008 readers

13 users here now

A community for discussion amongst professional software developers.

Posts should be relevant to those well into their careers.

For those looking to break into the industry, are hustling for their first job, or have just started their career and are looking for advice, check out:

Logo base by Delapouite under CC BY 3.0 with modifications to add a gradient

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

snowe

jmk1ng

drewsiferr

Why is the search functionality on sites like Reddit, really low quality? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/experienced_devs

11 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I wanted to ask a technical questions, maybe high level, on why sites may have bad search and what the bottlenecks might be in almost never updating such in years. Was there something in the original development of the stack that is affecting progressive updates around the feature, how should one approach "Search" then in this case? Or is it simply a management issue.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

There are "off the shelf" systems, for a sufficiently broad interpretation of "off the shelf." But they are not cheap (requiring probably a dedicated team just to properly configure and maintain, and probably also requiring significant rearchitecturing of your application's data), and are usually still quite shitty even after all that.

Search is just very, very hard. Much harder than even experienced devs who have not worked in the area appreciate.

Source: I am a dev on a major search engine. No, not that one, but one you have definitely used many times.