Preface

John and I met while working together as consultants for OpenSource Connections (OSC) solving tough search problems for clients. Sometimes we triaged performance (make it go faster!). Other times we helped build out a search application. All of these projects had simple-to-measure success metrics. Did it go faster? Is the application complete?

Search relevance, though, doesn’t play by these rules. And users, raised in the age of Google, won’t tolerate “good enough” search. They want “damn smart” search. They want search to prioritize criteria they care about, not what the search engine often idiotically guesses relevant.

Like moths attracted to a flame, we both felt drawn to this hard problem. And just like said moths, we often found ourselves burned. Through these painful lessons, we persevered and grew, succeeding at tasks we initially considered too difficult.

During this time, we also found our voices on OSC’s blog. We realized that little was being written about search relevance problems. We developed ideas such as testdriven relevancy. We documented our headaches, our problems, and our triumphs. Together we experimented with machine learning approaches, like latent semantic analysis. We dove into Lucene’s guts and explored techniques for building custom search components to solve problems. We began exploring information retrieval research. As we learned more techniques to solve hard problems, we continued to write about them.

Still, blogs have their limits. John and I always hoped to express our ideas more systematically in book form. Luckily, we experienced one of those funny chains of events that often lead to opportunity knocking. I presented on Python concurrency at a local tech meet-up along with Andrew Montalenti. Since Andrew was giving this talk at PyCon, Manning called Andrew to discuss writing a book on Python concurrency. Andrew said he wasn’t interested in writing a book, but perhaps his copresenter Doug would be.

It turns out I also wasn’t interested in writing a Python concurrency book, but I did have an idea for another book. I approached John with the idea, and a couple of conversations later, we’d pulled together a pretty motivating book proposal—and the rest is history!

That momentous phone call with Manning occurred nearly two years ago. And what a roller-coaster ride it’s been. As these things go, we bundled the book with other major life transitions. Both of us added babies to our families. I began a relevance consulting practice. John switched jobs, becoming Eventbrite’s resident search expert. Still, we couldn’t resist writing about this fascinating topic.

You’ll find this book unlike others on tech topics. This book won’t be an enumeration of one technology’s features. It’s more of a map through our years of pain, solving the hard problems that had no ready answers. In other words, we’ve walked through the search relevancy desert, stumbled upon the many oases, and learned how to avoid the sand people and the Stormtroopers.

We present to you this map through the desert, so you don’t get quite as lost as we did. Now excuse us while we hunt for the nearest beach to take a nap on ...

DOUG TURNBULL