Category: Search

Vincent Granville argues that Google search is on a slow decline:

What has happened over the last few years is that many websites are now getting most of their traffic from sources other than Google. Google is no longer the main source of traffic for most websites, because webmasters pursue other avenues to generate relevant traffic, in particular social networks and newsletter – as it is easier to attract the right people and promote the right content through these channels. Think about this: How did you discover Data Science Central? For most recent members, the answer is not Google anymore. In that sense, Google has lost its monopoly when it comes to finding interesting information on the Internet. The reason is that Google pushes more and more search results from partners, their own products, possibly content that fits with its political agenda, big advertisers, old websites, big websites, and web spammers who find a way to get listed at the top. In the meanwhile, websites such as ours promote more and more articles from little high quality publishers and great bloggers that have a hard time getting decent traffic from Google. For them, we are a much bigger and better source of traffic, than Google.

I think this is a fairly optimistic view of the situation, as there’s a difference between “I want to learn about a topic” versus “I want to learn this specific thing.”  I think Vincent’s argument is much stronger on the former, but when it comes to the latter, the first thing I hear people say is that they’re googling it.

Michael Sun has some tips to improve performance of Solr operations, focusing on memory tuning but including a few other tips as well:

For time series applications, it’s very common to have queries in the following pattern

q=*:*&fq=[NOW-3DAYS TO NOW]

However, this is not a good practice from memory perspective. Under the hood, Solr converts ‘NOW’ to a specific timestamp, which is the time when the query hits Solr. Therefore, two consecutive queries with the same field query fq=[NOW-3DAYS TO NOW] are considered different queries once ‘NOW’ is replaced by the two different timestamp. As a result, both of these queries would hit disk and can’t take advantage of caches.

In most of use cases, missing data of last minute is acceptable. Therefore, try to query in the following way if your business logic allows.

q=*:*&fq=[NOW/MIN-3DAYS TO NOW/MIN]

If you’re using Solr for full text search, this is rather useful information.

Jon Morisi has a solution for how to get page numbers for results back from PDFs when using Full-Text Search:

In my last blog post, Setting up Full-Text Search for PDF files, I detailed how to get things setup.  If you tried this you may have noticed that although the searches worked, what you got back was a file name.  This isn’t so helpful if your document is an all encompassing 538 pages.  So, how do we get a page number back?  The best I’ve come up with so far is to split the 538 pages into 538 documents and load / search on those.

My first google search on how to split a pdf into pages came back with, http://www.splitpdf.com/, so I went ahead and used that.  I’m sure there is a way to do this through acrobat or even roll your own split functionality via the API.

It’s not a particularly pretty solution, but it does work, and that’s important.