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Presentation given at East Bay Ruby meetup group on 4/19/2011 @ U.C. Berkeley
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2. About the Presenter Tim Spence
3. Former .NET developer 4. Recently converted to Ruby 5. In love with Open Source Software 6. More athttp://whyhello.im/tim 7. Agenda
8. Quick survey: how much time/effort did YOU spend implementing search on your webapp? 9. Examples of services that need improved search 10. IndexTank to the rescue 11. Case study:reddit.com 12. Agenda, continued
13. Two apps I built with IndexTank 14. Live Demo 15. 16. The State of Search Today
17. Barely How many pages of results do you typically browse through before finding what you were looking for? 18. Or do you give up and head for google site search instead? 19. Survey Time!
20. How many times have you iterated on your search feature? 21. When was the last time someone thanked you for building a powerful, reliable search feature for your webapp? 22. My Opinion
23. Minimal implementation is the norm 24. If it wasn't for MySQL/MS-SQL full text indexing, most apps probably wouldn't even have a search feature 25. Most good web apps don't make it easy for users to find specific content outside of predetermined navigation 26. Let's pick on some apps!
27. Don't worrythey can take it! 28. App #1: Github 29. App #1: Github 30. App #1: Github
31. Search by language However...
32. Check out this example 33. App #1: Github 34. App #1: Github
35. Can't search by most popular (most watched) 36. Are you ready to browse 1,297 results? Advanced search capabilities exist, but not the best interface
37. App #2: Amazon Web Services
38. Fact: probably not 39. App #2: Amazon Web Services 40. App #2: Amazon Web Services
41. Only sort by date, title Ready to browse 934 results?
Incredible missed opportunity
42. Stack search 43. etc... 44. Fact: Github & Amazon aren't the only ones
45. Massive quantities of quality content 46. Unfortunately not discoverable in meaningful ways 47. Interlude: Sites with great search
48. Recency 49. Rating Medhelp
50. Promoted content Other sites I overlooked?Whose search do you like? 51. What was the point of that last slide?
52. Any company willing to invest in the resources can build and host a high quality search engine 53. However, must you roll your own? 54. Enter Search as a Service
55. No need to reinvent the wheel
56. Let the experts refine it 57. IndexTank to the rescue!
58. Powerful
Always Improving
Freemium 59. Easy to implement 60. Let's talk features
Custom scoring 61. Autocomplete 62. Faceting 63. Geo search 64. Advanced text search 65.
Index multiple docs/sec 66. Overwrite existing docs as you wish
67. Custom Scoring
68. Choose which fields are searched 69. Use pre-written scoring functions 70. Or write your own 71. Custom Scoring 72. Everyone loves autocomplete
73. Potentially avoids spelling errors
Adds a degree of intelligence to the search process 74. Faceting
Consider your advanced users and the narrow results they seek
75. Faceting 76. Geo
77. Mobile is skyrocketingevery client has a GPS IndexTank has built-in geo proximity search capability 78. Geo 79. Advanced Text Search (Beta)
80. Stemming
Alternate spellings
81. Other Benefits
82. Scalability included for free 83. Easy implementation
84. Excellent documentationLet's check it out Excellent support
Dog food: their site search is done well 85. 86. Case Study:reddit.com
87. Who remembers how bad reddit's search was?
Can't blame them for trying
IndexTank excelled in all areas 88. Let's check it out now 89. My experience with IndexTank
90. Built my first irl Rails app in an afternoon/evening w/ fellow hacker Chris Saylor (@cwsaylor) 91. Didn't win the contest but learned how easy it is to quickly create highly targeted search 92. App #1: Toxosis
93. Hosted athttp://toxosis.heroku.com/ 94. Search enabled on many fields including city/state/zip, toxin 95. Additional fields can be added to index
96. More personal backstory
97. How to get a Rails gig?Developan appmultiple Rails apps and showitthem off 98. Opportunities are everywherecontests, hackathons, and weekend hacks for developer community 99. App #2: SXSWdex
100. Hosted athttp://sxswdex.heroku.com/ 101. Design goal: do a better job than SXSW official site 102. Search within bio, company, location, name 103. Facets: company, city/state 104. The moment we've all been waiting for
105. Questions?