Search engines make archives, inventories, websites, large publishing platforms, and the internet navigable. Using the search engine we built at WordPress.com, a platform where more than 90 million blog posts and web pages are published per month, as an example, I will explain how search engines work and how their performance can be evaluated.
Search engines make archives, inventories, websites, large publishing platforms, and the internet navigable. In this talk, I will introduce the basic building blocks of a search engine.
WordPress.com is a platform where anyone can create a blog or website, and read posts that are published there and elsewhere. More than 90 million posts and pages are published on WordPress.com per month. To make it easier for our users to find the ones they are most interested in, we built a search engine that is based on Elasticsearch.
In order to keep improving our search algorithm, we need to track and analyze our user’s interactions with the search results. I will present an overview of the metrics we and others use to evaluate the performance of search algorithms.