IDEAS SoCal Data Science Conference 2017

Whether it is to browse the web, to shop the latest trends or to retrieve relevant documents, search engines make our lives easier, and we use them on a daily basis, both in our personal and professional lives. However, no matter how effortless they appear, their creation is anything but easy. In reality, large corporations employ tens and even sometimes hundreds of engineers, product managers and data scientists to support the development, improvement and maintenance of the entire system. In this talk, I will explain how search differs across industries and how enterprise search contrasts with retail search or web search.  I will describe some of the most popular ranking algorithms and give some tips about how to choose the one that is the most appropriate for your application. I will also dig into the different peripheral algorithms and pieces that come into play, emphasizing the main reasons why creating a comprehensive, high-performance engine is ultimately a very challenging task.