Breaking Search For Fun and Profit
summary
Shows concrete breakages on real sites: London School of Economics search returns nothing for "accommodation" while a working student-accommodation site exists, Sainsbury's fails to find "French press", a product link becomes a 404, Zando's search silently forces the women's category then drops the query, UN search returns "homepage test", and Perplexity answers the juggling world record as 11 while contested runs show 12–14. Classifies failures as zero results, irrelevant results and made-up answers, explains fixes like autosuggest, contextual summaries, RAG and explainability, and demonstrates gov.uk and Screwfix as working examples.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (7)
- 0:00Introduction to breaking search
- 1:45Broken search examples
- 11:02Types of broken search
- 13:30Why search fails users
- 15:56Positive search examples
- 18:23Can we do better?
- 19:08Q&A
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