I took down my own search 🔥
Because I liked asks what you loved and why, then finds films, shows, books and games that match the why. Part 1 was how it works; part 2 was measuring it. This one is shorter on cleverness and longer on mistakes. In one week I broke search for real users, found the cause was an experiment I'd forgotten was still running, taught it that "animated" doesn't always mean cartoon, and added 1,810 films for 38 cents. Every title page shows "More like this": its 12 nearest neighbours, precomputed into a table so a page view is one indexed read instead of a vector search. After adding a batch of films, I started a job to recompute those lists for all 14,000 titles. Six titles at a time, each one a vector search. Search is having trouble right now. Please try again. The vector search behind every query was hitting Postgres's statement timeout; with retries, a search took 26 seconds to fail. The…



























































