Online search not all about Google

For several years running into decades, if you could not find what you wanted by typing a few words into the familiar search box, then it may well not exist because Google was the web.

With a bigger bag of words than anyone else, Google excelled as it was able to pluck out what you wanted out of its bag quicker than anyone else.

In those days, searching as a computer operation was quite straightforward as it gave fast and accurate access to the blog, website or Wikipedia page people sought.

The sheer size of the web meant there was, and still is, a lot of information to index but it tended to stay in the same place. Doing a good job involved analysing the words on the web pages and logging how many other sites saw that page as definitive.

Search engine expert, Stephen Emmott has noted that searching has got a lot more complicated thanks to our increasingly complicated online and business lives.

Fast response

Modern life offers people the opportunity to call up instant taxi service, find a date or soul mate, or stream movies you could watch in a life time, instead of just looking up web pages.

It is a known fact that if you use applications throughout the day, you will be touching on a lot of services and search engines that mostly does not involve Google technology. There are instead, new pretenders to search engines such as Elastic and Solr.

Unlike previously that searching was all about typing test, today’s searching involve swiping right, moving a map with your fingers or talking to an app, as said by Shay Banon, founder of Elastic, which makes the open source search technology used by the likes of Tinder, eBay, Uber, Lyft and Netflix.

An interesting scenario is Uber and Lyft that have to match against location as well as the preferences of both their drivers and riders. Netflix and eBay similarly do a lot of number crunching to answer queries and make suggestions for their massive user populations.

Food facts

Mr. Banon wrote the first version of Elastic to help his wife who was studying to be a cordon bleu chef.

“I decided to write a recipe app for her and needed to figure out how to add a search box to it to look through all the knowledge she was accumulating.”

Mr. Shay Banon, Founder of Elastic

Elastic got its start helping a budding chef organise recipes and techniques

Just indexing the information in all the recipes, techniques and tricks she was learning was not enough, he said.

“I needed a search engine that was highly curated to her experience and her knowledge from the culinary world,” said Mr. Banon.

That step involved representing relationships between the different elements and organising the information so it could be queried quickly.

Tinder, for instance, uses Elastic to manage more than 300 million search queries every day.

And just as modern web businesses rely on search to keep them running, almost every business has realised that search is a basic function they have to get right.

This is because good analysis of customer data and a search in all but name can reveal important unseen relationships or snags in a sales process that need smoothing out.

Edward Kyei Frimpong-Mybeeponline