2025-06-17 –, Kesselhaus
With a little experience it's easy to find site search queries that don't work. With live examples picked from a variety of high-profile websites, I'll show you how to easily break search - and discuss what we mean by 'broken', the different kinds of failure and what they reveal about the underlying search engine and how we might improve it.
Even the most sophisticated search system will fail in some cases - we simply can't predict all the possible queries the user might try, what they are actually trying to achieve and how they might express their needs. Let's try together to break search on a number of well-known websites - but not just for fun! There are different kinds of 'broken' - zero result searches, irrelevant results, system errors - we'll describe each of these and show examples, creating a classification system for search failures. We'll then talk about what underlying issues with search we might be able to reveal and how they could be fixed to improve overall search quality.
Search, Stories
Level:Beginner
I am a leading figure in the search industry, known for an honest, neutral and pragmatic viewpoint; I have held multiple roles including senior consultant, strategic advisor, project manager, sales & marketing director, conference organiser & speaker, trainer, writer & mentor. I am deeply connected with the business & technology of website and enterprise search engines with particular experience of small, high-value consulting companies. My past experience in software engineering gives me a highly informed perspective on search technology with a particular focus on open source platforms such as Lucene, Apache Solr, Elasticsearch and OpenSearch. More recently I have helped several companies use modern AI techniques to supercharge search. I co-wrote Searching the Enterprise, ran the Haystack conference for 5 years and held leadership positions at OpenSource Connections and Flax.