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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

I remember when they used to sell a physical search box that you could plug into your server.

I had the pleasure of working with two of these. They did not give you the same quality of results that Google's website did. Utter garbage in a blue rack mounted case.

One thing I've heard from multiple googlers is that their internal wiki search is crap exactly because there's limited hyperlinking to give a good ranking for pages. Google's algorithm basically crunches a lot of human provided data (inbound links, clicks, dwell, etc.) into an algorithmic score, but with limited data it's not much better than tf-idf.

That's probably the same thing that you've encountered with the search appliance.

I think you might have to change your "is" to a "was". wiki isn't really used anymore and the internal search is really really good.

You guys don't use a wiki anymore? What replaced it?

Seems some form of wiki always has value inside a company?

There's a ton of different forms of documentation within Google, but mainly Google Docs or markdown.

What is tf-idf, if you don’t mind me asking

It's a search scoring algorithm, combining how frequently the search term is used in a document with how frequently it appears in other documents.

A word that shows up in the document and no others means it gets a very high score, vs "and" shows up in every document and thus doesn't score well for any

Term Frequency/Inverse Document Frequency.

It's what Apache Lucene does which is what ElasticSearch uses under the hood.

https://lmgtfy.app/?q=tf+idf

Pretty much. Internal search at Google actually used these appliances for a long time. Fortunately it's still been evolved and was externalised as a Google Cloud product a few years back.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Search_Appliance 2002-2019

The loss of merch was the writing on the wall. ;)

The appliance used to come with a T-shirt, but no longer includes one.

I remember when Apple sold me a developer license that came with a T shirt each year...

I was on a team that set one of those up for the Fox Filmed Entertainment intranet. It was a mess to set up, but it did look cool.

I used to sell those. They were actually quite good for their time, especially when they first came out, but they were really expensive.

Its weird that Google has been so half-hearted about «enterprise search» since they stopped selling GSAs. You would think that they would be itching to know what lies behind your firewall.

Remember hosted urchin?

That was probably the Google Search Appliance.

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