ApacheCon EU 2014

Web sites without search functionality are unimaginable today - you search for comments and code on github, you look for books in your favourite webshop, you use the search box of your favourite blog to find articles.

When offering your search for your own application - how do you know that your search actually provides a benefit to the user instead of causing lots of frustration over results not found? Only checking that the favourite book about witches of your child is ranked top of all children books clearly doesn’t help.

This talk will walk you through the options of determining search quality - from purely offline metrics that work even before deploying version 1.0 to production to online A/B testing to check continuous improvement. I will highlight some Lucene and Elasticsearch features that can tremendously help you deploy your own search quality checks.